Community has always been really important to us at paha silmä.
It’s probably the single biggest reason why we make music together. That feeling of belonging somewhere just feels good. It fills some strange, hard-to-explain gap deep inside us.
But that sense of belonging doesn’t just happen by itself. It takes shape over years, often a little by accident. It grows in shared spaces, recurring conversations, collective wins and shared failures. Community appears when someone does something brave. Makes an initiative. Creates something not because they have to, but because they genuinely want to and then open it up for others to join, shape and make their own.
Networks and communities
People talk a lot about networking in culture. The idea behind networks is important and valuable, but personally it always gives me a small sense of panic.
Not because I don’t want to meet people.
But because a network can sometimes feel like something built around forced usefulness.
When I think of myself as part of a network, I start feeling pressure to already have things figured out. To know how things are done. To make myself important.
In other words: to be useful.
To me, community is the opposite of that.
Community comes from something completely different than mutual usefulness, even if thats still side effect of it.
Community comes from people recognising that same restlessness in each other: The Itch that pushes us to do things that don’t always have any rational reason behind them. And then creating spaces and structures where that restlessness is allowed to find its own shape.
Scope as a community
A community like Scope doesn’t first ask what you can offer.
It asks who you are, what you’d like to do and how it can help make that possible.
Maybe that’s why Scope has resonated with us so strongly.
Not just as a platform to release our art or as a studio space, but as a place where people can meet without every interaction needing to lead somewhere.
I think the best ideas and the most beautiful art usually happen as a side effect of communities like this. Almost by accident. All of that art already exists inside people. It just doesn’t come out through pressure.
It needs space, time, care and a certain kind of hard-to-explain energy.
At its best, this is exactly what Scope offers.
Conversations backstage, the Backstage in itself, and events that bring creative people together!
Small moments of realisation at a show from an emerging artists, high fives somewhere on Kolmas Linja. These moments don’t appear out of nowhere, even if we don’t always stop to think about what connects them.
For us at paha silmä, that has meant opportunities to perform. The possibility to record and release our own music. Events that inspire us. People willing to mentor us in things I personally know almost nothing about. Or Grapevine the community channel that lets people know what’s happening beneath the surface.
The list could go on.
But like I said, I think the most important things happen behind all those practical benefits and structures. At its simplest form its about the opportunity to do what we love.
To make art.
Who are the artists behind the paha silmä?
We’re paha silmä records and we’re proudly members of Scope. Our crew consists of Yael Emili, TAMHATTAN, Rikki Pede, Torjantai and Heikki Houdini. Our music is produced, mixed and mastered by SAYV. This autumn we’re releasing our mixtape, and we’ve already opened the door to that world through two singles released through Scope: bad eye moodi and ilman siipii.
At the core of it all, we make culture. Not in the most efficient way possible But because we feel a compulsive need to do it. We come from closet studios and couch-cyphers, from places where the future is still blurry and cables are tangled.
We don’t come together through Scope because we already know exactly what we’re doing.
We come together because we’re trying to figure it out together.
— paha silmä records / Heikki
@pahasilmarecords
@pahasilma