Photo: Jennifer Moser

Max Lilja, Apocalyptica

"Apocalyptica" from Finland play Heavy Metal music on classical strings

In front of the stage, an impossibly diverse crowd mills in expectation. There's the typical heavy metal throng, mostly young and male, enthusiastically warming up for an evenings headbanging, stage-diving and making horn signs with their fingers; there are a few female goths, apprehensive and eager, and then there's the other fans, mostly female, all of them geeky, and totally out of control -- they are the "rabid cellists" that form the hard core of the audience. Along the sides and further back in the rooms, there are the usual hangers-on of organized culture, conventional and alternative alike.

On the stage, there are four chairs and four reddish-brown classical celli. The backdrop of the stage, however, is a large, stylised skull. The musicians, when they appear, are attired in the leftovers of fringe culture: there is a very tall, trollish one with black but rather commonplace and geeky clothes, a pasty-faced nonentity distinguished mainly by his mass of long, straight hair that always seems in danger being fatally entangled by the cello strings, a creature clothed in a loose fishnet shirt, staring vacuuously into space, clearly enamoured by the way his cruelly bleached hair catches the blue stage lights, and a muscular, dark-haired fellow who is dressed in a dark blue latex t-shirt and grins diablolically throughout. They bow, are tempestuously cheered, groan something into the microphone in their very gruff Finnish voices that may -- or may not -- be the title of the song they're going to play, they sit down, and begin to saw away vigorously on their celli.

Their performance is intense and almost mind-altering. Two of the celli provide the bass riffs that carry the mood down into the accustomed Heavy Metal darkness, while the other two go wild in those region mainstream bands reserve for guitar and voice. While the first two mainly emulate the conventional rock instruments with intense and sustained gusto and verve (cheating on classical cello playing techniques by grabbing their bows with their whole hands instead of just with the tips of their fingers, as music school teaches worldwide), the other two reach almost classical and lyric heights, especially in the slower, calmer and more beautiful pieces.

Photo: Jennifer Moser

Apocalyptica on stage

Apocalyptica isn't all darkness and violence - that's perhaps the final explanation to their allure. They know very well that they need the softer, more beautiful, lushly romantic tones to contrast against their typical hard and dark cello riffs. Some of the pieces, especially those that Eicca Toppinen (the one with all the hair) wrote exculsively for the band, rise calmly above a boiling sea of dark and heated rage that builds the underlying Metal counterpoint. In the middle of the undescribably frenzy that is an Apocalyptica performance, there are those calm, serene moments of almost painful beautiful before we are swept away, again, into darkness and chaos.

Watching them interact on the stage, driving each other into a sweaty paroxysm any mainstream Metal bass player would be envious, you begin to guess that they don't take themselves entirely serious - with the exception of the vapid creature in fishnet on the far left, perhaps. This is just a student joke which has been going on for several years and has by now gotten way out of hand - but still, these four are enjoying themselves immensely, calssical music students that gleefully demolish everything held sacred by their teachers.

Originally, their idea was really quite simple: to play Heavy Metal music on classical instruments -- cellos. Metallica fans since their teenage days, the four young cellists first played Metallica songs on their instruments while they were at a summer camp with Helsinki's Sibelius Academy where they all studied cello. They arraganged a small choice of Heavy Metal songs and played them for fellow students - for fun, for practice, for originality. Just the thing students tend to do at summer camp, really; especially if they're Finns. After playing at student parties for some time they got the chance to perform at the Heavy Metal club Teatro in Helsinki. As miracles still happen, at this performance they made some contacts finally enabling them to record their first album for the independent label Zen Garden Records.

While their first album Apocalyptica Plays Metallica By Four Cellos contained only Metallica cover songs, the variety widened with the seconds album Inquisition Symphony. Besides cover songs from other Heavy Metal bands like Sepultura, the album contained three of theirown compositions. The biggest step in their development happened with the publication of their third album, Cult. Mostly comprised of their own compositions, Cult shows the fully fledged Apocalyptica style. Their classical roots have gained even more influence: there is even a "apocalyptic" version of a classical piece on the album. Their version of Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain king" might make some Grieg lovers cringe - but the fans simply love the piece!

Photo: Jennifer Moser

Eicca Toppinen, Apocalyptica

Today, Apocalyptica are much more than a Metallica cover band. They have their own style and play their own songs. The people at the concerts do not come to hear Metallica songs, they come to experince Apocalyptica. The four ex-Sibelius Academy students Eicca Toppinen, Paavo Lötjönen, Max Lilja and Perttu Kivilaakso (replaced Antero Manninen who left the band in '99) have released three albums, worked in numerous cooperations with other musicians and have been touring through Europe, Mexico and Japan almost nonstop for the last few years.

The diverse crowd that throngs the performances has built its own community on the Internet, mostly hanging out on the forum pages of Apocalyptica's own homepage; then, there are fan pages with enormous amounts of concert and backstage photos. The dual and counterpointal nature of Apocalyptica's music which happily embraces the most extreme of contraries is sure to attract the entusiasm of many, many more - once we heard them, once we experienced them, we are hooked and drift off on the tangent they opened us, out of the compartmentalised cultural mainstream that governs our more everyday entertainment. This is fun, yes, but it is always a challenge to our perception and serves to wake us and open us to the world with all its beauty and darkness.