Chapter

01

In Residence

Kaiku, Helsinki

Celebrating 12 of the world's best dance floors

In 2016, RA's In Residence series is celebrating club culture by throwing a month of parties at 12 of the world's best clubs. Clubs are the beating heart of dance music, and these are the venues that keep their local scenes thriving. Week-in, week-out, they open their doors to play the music we love.

Helsinki's effortlessly stylish Kaiku is home to In Residence during July. Opened in 2013, it's the latest in Toni Rantanen's long line of essential nightspots in the Finnish capital. Although established as a predominately house and disco spot, it's become home to a hugely diverse range of music—from tough techno and EBM, to the experimental fringes of bass music. The club is not afraid to take risks, which has meant it's developed a dedicated following of Helsinki music fans of all ages.

As we settle in for a month at each of the clubs we'll be running features that, through a combination of different media, aim to provide lasting documents of these iconic spaces.

July 08 RA In Residence, Kaiku, Helsinki
feat. Honey Dijon, Lipelis, Baba Stiltz, Lauri Soini, Emma Valtonen

July 15 RA In Residence, Kaiku, Helsinki
feat. Zip, Pender Street Steppers, Trevor Deep Jr., Lil Tony, Sansibar, DJ Windows95man

July 22 RA In Residence, Kaiku, Helsinki
feat. Lena Willikens , Intergalactic Gary, Kristiina Männikkö, DJ soFa, Ya Tosiba

July 29 RA In Residence, Kaiku, Helsinki
feat. Olof Dreijer (The Knife), SØS Gunver Ryberg, Scientific Dreamz of U, Jori Hulkkonen, Juho Kusti

Chapter

02

Key info

Kaiku at a glance

01
Address
Kaikukatu 4, 00530, Helsinki, Finland
02
Club opened
2013
03
Soundsystem
Danley
04
Capacity
400
05
Resident DJs
Lil Tony, Lauri Soini, Kristiina Männikkö, Emma Valtonen, Juho Kusti, Fummer, Antti Salonen, Jori Hulkkonen, Sansibar, DJ Windows95man, Trevor Deep Jr, Jaakko Kestilä, J.Lindroos, Ender, Newhouse, Noah Kin
06
Dance floors
2
07
Music policy
Tunes for dancing with friends to

Chapter

03

History

A Helsinki lineage

In any conversation about Helsinki's dance music scene, one name is guaranteed to come up. Toni Rantanen, AKA Lil Tony, might have releases on labels like Innervisions, Moodmusic and Running Back, along with recent headline slots at Lux Frágil and Sub Club, but he's not only one of Finland's most successful house and techno exports. For the past three decades he's also been working tirelessly to keep his local scene up to international standards.

Rantanen runs a number of Helsinki's key music venues. There's Ääniwalli, an 800-capacity building that's hosted some of techno's biggest names (Jeff Mills, Ben Klock, Marcel Dettman, Robert Hood and so on). Ääniwalli is often used for live shows, as well as the VUM open-air events every Sunday in the summer on its 1000-capacity terrace.

Then there's Siltanen, a vinyl-only DJ bar with a no-house-or-techno policy that also houses a Vietnamese restaurant, Liemi.

Kuudes Linja is the oldest in Rantanen's current roster, having opened in 2005. It's focused on live music but sometimes books techno.

Stidilä is a sauna-cum-afterparty venue that's available for hire.

And then there's Kaiku.

(Rantanen is also a founder of Helsinki's Flow, an annual festival with 60,000 attendees and hundreds of acts.)

Rantanen's passion for electronic music was mostly formed through travelling in his youth. "I think my inspiration started through late '80s trips to Berlin, Ibiza and London," he says. "In Helsinki in the late '80s there was Club Berlin, which was basically an acid house and techno club. I actually started DJing when I was 18 years old, and quite quickly started putting on parties as well. We started running underground parties in the early '90s. We decided to open our own place because we knew how to run the business and we wanted to have a better soundsystem and DJ booth than the other clubs in Helsinki at that time had."

The first club Rantanen and his business partner Timi Uskali opened, Kerma, was in 1997. Rantanen says the club, located in the hip-but-expensive Punavuori district, was "very popular" from the beginning. Kerma is now closed, but in the time between then and 2013, when Kaiku opened, he's been incredibly busy, opening new clubs at a staggering rate, each with its own character and direction. Back in 2009, Marcel Dettmann named one of his clubs, Redrum, as one of his top-five party spots. Dettmann played there at least three times a year, as did Ben Klock. "Âme was basically a resident too," Rantanen says. The list of other vital Helsinki nightspots he's opened goes on—Soda, Åbo, Oujee, Rose Garden, Club YK.

While the presence of these clubs might have been a near constant, Helsinki has changed a lot since Rantanen and his crew first started out. "The area where Kaiku is located, Kallio, was not really a cool place back in the day," he says. "But we brought the first club there in the early 2000s. It's called Kuudes Linja. Nowadays this area is very nice and full of young people and nice restaurants—like the Punavuori district used to be from the early '90s to around 2000." These days Kuudes Linja mainly hosts live concerts, although it's had its fair share of international techno stars through its doors. It also hosted Helsinki's legendary Darkroom events, which saw unannounced international DJs play seven-hour sets. It was Kuudes Linja that lead Rantanen to Kaiku.

"We found out about Kaiku long before we rented it because it's right next door to Kuudes Linja in the same building," Rantanen says. Nowadays, the two venues share a terrace. "I always thought that it was a lovely space with nice windows. Somehow it reminds me of Robert Johnson."

Robert Johnson was actually the first club that came to my mind when I walked into Kaiku's main room. This could be explained by the wooden interior and the windows behind the DJ booth. But Kaiku feels like a much larger space. The mixing table is suspended by chains from the ceiling, similar to the old Panorama Bar setup. Once it's in full flow, the room has an identity all of its own, an identity that prompted Young Marco to pick it as one of the best clubs in the world in a Guardian interview. "If I designed a club it would look like this one," he said. "A big wooden box, a great soundsystem, a rotary mixer in the booth and working turntables (which is not a given these days, unfortunately). Combine that with a very open-minded crowd and great programming and you have Kaiku." The club's 50-capacity second room also stands out. Lined with extravagant chairs and visuals projected onto curtains, it occasionally hosts its own standalone parties, such as hip-hop or gay nights.

The distinctive identity is further aided by Kaiku's unmistakable visual direction. Linda Linko is in charge of graphics and artwork for the club, and alongside Jaako Suomalainen she designed a font exclusively for the venue. On each poster only the colour and basic information changes. There are a number of reasons for this. "It's a very cost effective system", Lauri Soini, the club's booker and resident DJ, tells me. "It's also maybe a bit more timeless. It doesn't really underline guests or genres or anything. It puts everyone on same level."

"The idea of Kaiku posters was pretty clear from the beginning," Linko says. "I have always liked old music posters based on typography, the ones that have slightly funny letter spacing and lining. I was also inspired by the fact that the building where Kaiku is used to be a match factory. I had the idea of a combination of old factory machines and circus typography. I wanted the type to look both very bold and strong, but with a bit of a curvy feminine feel and a hint of oddness." Kaiku was awarded Gold at the European Graphic Design Awards in 2014.

Not everything at Kaiku has been plain sailing. As is the case in most major cities, plenty of hoops needed to be jumped through for the local authorities. "It was a nightmare to get a license, because there hasn't been a club or a restaurant in the space before," Rantanen says. "We had to build everything from scratch. First we realised that the Funktion-One system we had in there was too big, and the neighbours were complaining about the subs, so we had to get new triple-glazed windows installed after opening. But now in Helsinki electronic music is doing well. We might get a 24-hour licence to play music next year, and now we have a lot of afterhours and 23-hour parties. Because of the law we need to keep the place closed for one hour, like from four until five AM, which is a bit of a crazy situation."

Rantanen has no plans to stop looking for another spot to add to his roster. "We will expand to all the venues in the old building where Kaiku is located," he says. "The idea is to have five or six venues with a total capacity around 2,500. Each venue will have its own unique idea and music policy, and it will be called COMPLEX. We can also do very nice indoor 'festivals' in the cold winter time, which is new for Helsinki." Six individual interlocking venues in the same building would sound to most people like a terrifying fever dream, but looking back at everything that's been achieved, this just feels like Rantanen's logical next step.

Chapter

04

Residents

...in pictures

Chapter

05

Character profile

Lauri Soini

Promoter, booker, resident DJ

The first line of Lauri Soini's biography describes him as "Helsinki's one-man entertainment centre." As he's a promoter, booker and resident DJ at Kaiku, this feels like an accurate description. Having worked closely with Toni Rantanen across multiple events and clubs over the past 15 years, it's safe to say that Soini is a preeminent figure in the local scene. Kaiku, however, is the first time he's been able to fully sink his teeth into a project. "I kind of want Kaiku to appear like it's living its own life and not to focus too much on the characters," he says. "Especially at the start I wanted to have more options with the music being played, and trying not to be a generic club where you would experience the same stuff and people every weekend."

Soini says techno and dancing changed something in him. When he first heard mixes in the early '90s, he immediately began to find records with a view to performing. "I started DJing before I was old enough to go out in clubs," he says. "Back then I would sneak into Toni's parties before the bouncers came on the door, just to hangout in the corner and listen to the early-hours dub house and techno stuff that I was into. I developed a never-ending warmup attitude to DJing. During my first real gigs I played techno in a squat building run by punks; now they have an empty Nokia office standing on the same place. After starting off as a techno and house DJ I developed into a recording and performing artist, and finally, with disco, I moved into promoting small nights. Basically it was like climbing in a tree backwards, 'ass first,' as we say in Finnish."

There was a time when the life of an international artist seemed to call for Soini. He toured with a friend, performing live as Hannulelauri for a few years, but eventually his hometown called for him. "Travelling is fun but I was always missing the community of Helsinki," he says. "Something changed around that time. The music and crowds were crossing more boundaries, and I think that a wave of people started having fun together. I made a lot of friends around then compared to my earlier nerd-life playing World Of Warcraft... I think important stuff grows from the inside out."

Chapter

06

Soundsystem profile

Danley

"There are two good soundsystems in Europe, and one is in Finland."

That's how Mark Ernestus of Basic Channel and Hard Wax described the soundsystem that wound up sitting at the heart of Kaiku. You would think that after praise like that a club would have been wise to leave everything exactly as it was, but the team at Kaiku know better than to rest on their laurels. Since then, they’ve installed an entirely new system.

"The Void system and the stack of bass we had before was really good," Lauri Soini says. "It was more of a dancehall setup, sometimes maybe even a little too much bass for our lofty room." Kaiku has been open for three years, and its current Danley setup is its third different installation. "First, we had Funktion-One but soon we decided to move all the F1 stuff to our rugged warehouse, Ääniwalli. That's where we play only techno and it suits best for that stuff. All of our soundsystems are good—we just need to find the right room for them."

"I would say now the Danley soundsystem is the best so far for Kaiku," says Soini. "The bass is sharp but warm, but also the mids and highs are quite soft and saturated. You're able to play all kinds of dance music, with instruments, vocals and especially vinyl. For the terrace we use L-Acoustics, as it projects the energy only where we need it, and not into the glass cabinet of the neighbours' porcelain collection."

Speakers
- 4x Danley SH46
- 3x Danley DBH218

Amps & processing
- Danley DSLP48
- 4x MC2 E25 amps for SH46
- 2x Danley EDA 12000 for DBH218

Monitoring
- 2x Funktion-one RM18 with Funktion-one F60Q amp

Chapter

07

Mixes

The sound of Kaiku

Lauri Soini mixes up the moods

"I took three packed bags of records from my hallway and went to do a studio mix. It's basically stuff that I play at our events during weekends.

It includes some early-hour sounds that people usually miss when they arrive late, records that I always carry to Kaiku but I end up saving them for the "right moment," which might be at someone's afterparty. Also some records I take with me by mistake, as I have a monthly wave/Italo/new beat night in our bar next door. In the mix there's some deep house, techno, disco, electro, new wave, acid house, old trance and a couple of recent party tracks in random order. I just noticed that I didn't reach to my classic disco 12-inches at all—reason might be that I recorded the mix on a Tuesday at midnight, alone in the basement and without a cocktail.

The mix was recorded with two SL1200s and a DJR-400, in Helsinki, July 12th, 2016."

Tracklist /
Felix Da Housecat - Temptation
Mr Fingers - Children At Play
Florence - The Vineyard
Nemisis - After The Storm
Mark Archer - Dream Plant
Hexagone - Sea Brids
Der Zyklus - Formenverwandler
Espresso - Let's Get Down
J. M. Band - Computer Monkey Instr.
Ponzu Island - Super Koto
Sfire - Sfire 6
Casey Tucker - Blue Light Factor
Tons Of Tones - Photogene
Techno Grooves - 100% Of DX-ing You
Pale Blue - Acid Waves
Paul Rutherford - Get Real
De Ambassade - Geen Genade
Car Crash Set - Two Songs

Still haven't got your Kaiku fix? You can visit its club profile here, and there's more information on the series via the dedicated In Residence page.