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Raoul Bj
by Wilbur MacKenzie
Raoul Björkenheim/William Parker/Hamid DrakeDMG @ The Stone, Vol. 2DMG-ARC2008 Scorch TrioBrolt! Rune Grammofon2008 BoxStudio 1 Rune Grammofon2008 Los Angeles-born, Finnish guitarist Raoul Björkenheim spent the better part of this decade living in New York City before returning to Finland, regularly blazing his way through exuberant sets ...
Continue ReadingRaoul Bjorkenheim: Guitarist Between Two Continents
by Anthony Shaw
Raoul Bjorkenheim is a guitarist born and brought up in the States by his Finnish mother. After completing studies at Berklee he has spent most of his professional life between the two countries, working with the likes of Finnish percussionist/composer Edward Vesala or progressive producer/bassist Bill Laswell. He achieved recognition on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1990's with his own band Krakatau with two stunning recordings Ritual and Alive, the former now being rereleased on Cuneiform. The ...
Continue ReadingRaoul Bj: Shadowglow
by Rico Cleffi
There are moments on Shadowglow where Raoul Björkenheim and Lukas Ligeti achieve such an intuitive balance that it's hard to tell who's playing what. Björkenheim is a percussive guitarist, Ligeti a melodic drummer who plays the kit (and a variety of other percussion instruments) with remarkable fluidity. Björkenheim is capable of making his guitar sound like a thumb piano, a gamelan, or a sandstorm. The two players are clearly listening, and the music breathes and swells accordingly. Noisy ...
Continue ReadingRaoul Bj: Ritual
by AAJ Staff
Finnish-American guitarist Raoul Björkenheim is more or less the definition of iconoclast, which is especially notable given the fact that he attended one of the biggest jazz factories in the United States, Boston's Berklee School of Music. Berklee has employed and produced its share of guitarists (including most prominently alumnus John Scofield and professor Pat Metheny), but none sound even remotely like Björkenheim. He's uniquely noisy, focused, and open to lessons from genres as disparate as death metal and free ...
Continue ReadingRaoul Bjorkenheim: Apocalypso
by Glenn Astarita
Born in Los Angeles, CA and a longtime resident of Helsinki, Finland, cutting-edge guitarist Raoul Bjorkenheim has carved out a successful and somewhat entrepreneurial musical persona in the Euro progressive rock scene. He first came to prominence with the late drummer Edward Vesala's Sound & Fury band, while subsequently creating the avant-garde and widely acclaimed quasi-free jazz/rock unit Krakatau. Subsequent to his performance on Finland-based UMO Jazz Orchestra's Electrifying Miles CD and a recent ambient-based outing with guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, ...
Continue ReadingRaoul Bj: Apocalypso
by AAJ Staff
Guitarist Raoul Björkenheim wields his instrument like a knife on the ironically double-entendred Apocalypso. Sometimes he stabs, other times he engraves; or he might twist and jab, or simply scratch. Maybe it's just a Finnish thing, but brightness and Björkenhim just don't go together. The story behind this composition is relatively brief: in 1994, the Helsinki Juhlaviikot Festival commissioned him to write a piece for a hundred guitars. They managed to compromise at 42 musicians instead. His group performed Apocalypso ...
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