Kärtsy Band

Kärtsy Hatakka, the leader and primus motor of the band Waltari , has become recognized as one of the most remarkable faces in the history of Finnish rock music. Waltari was the first Finnish band to start this well-known invasion of Finnish hard rock/metal music into Europe in early 90s. They signed a worldwide record deal with Roadrunner Records in 1992 and soon were one of the first Finnish rock bands to hit the European charts and stages in mid 90s. Besides Waltari Kärtsy, as a full time musician since 1991, has also had a lot of other remarkable musical engangements here and there in different fields of music, including a pioneering soundtrack work for a legendary Finnish computer game Max Payne (link) (parts 1 and 2). And now, as the newest project, he is continuing his solo artist career, which he already started some years back under a name K2, continuing it later with his other side project Wax-Real Time Orchestra.

If we count in the Max Payne games that have sold six million copies worldwide, Kärtsy´s contribution can be heard on seven million units sold in total. As a musical chameleon and an avid David Bowie fan, this secretly gothic composer has been interested in hard-hitting guitars as well as synthesizers throughout his entire life, with maintaining original rock-and-roll attitude without respect to any genre borders. The enthusiasm towards different fields of rock music has begun already at an early age through his family, and the musical influences, at least attitudewise, along with all the classical rock bands and artists of 60s and 70s were passionly absorbed to his head already in his childhood. However, from the first Punk/New Wave bands in late 70s-early 80s he then found his first personal musical innovators, which kicked him, along with his elder brother´s band, to put up his first own line-up, already at the age of 11, which included already his long term band mate in Waltari, Jariot Lehtinen.

As an 80s teenager Kärtsy then invented and developed his personal musical legacy in various bands, with combining this openminded attitude from old classic bands, and, on the other hand, the new sounds of his generation of the 80s. From this soup then developed the band Waltari in 1986, and, after 10 albums, is still going strong. The same attitude still keeps Kärtsy constantly searching for some new sounds and styles, his hunger of keeping rock music fresh is endless.

As a new challenge, Kärtsy has now formed a fresh solo line-up, with some Finnish pro musicians behind him, f.e. Janne Kärkkäinen (a former guitar player of Sunrise Avenue). Through the years with Waltari and other projects he has every now and then come up to the situations, where he has realized, that even this super large style spectre of metal/industrial/rock/punk/hip hop still hasn´t been able to feed all his musical visions, especially Waltari being nowadays more or less dealing with the hard rock/metal side of the music world. There has still remained a lot of ideas, which don´t fit in the current formulas. In brief, this solo project is about to be everything which the current Waltari is not. At the moment Kärtsy´s band is now starting to do the small club shows without any stress everywhere, as the slogan "we go everywhere they want us to go", playing interestingly versatile samples of all the different corners of his career so far, not only Waltari. And of course there are also lots of new songs especially made for this project, and naturally a record deal for this part of the career is also a future plan. These solo songs have then turned out to be, surprisingly, simple guitar rock songs.......so far:).