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Little Rose Productions
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| Interview with Manu Lehtinen Date: 30th June 1999 Where: Rotterdam, the Netherlands in a backstage room of Nighttown (famous club) Label's hometown: Jyväskylä Address: Box 533, 40101 Jyväskylä, Finland, see Links section for website Interview by MPO
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| For those of you who don't know, Little Rose Productions is a small company in Finland
doing a mail-order service in Christian hard music and a record label. They did albums of
Deuteronomium, Mordecai and Immortal Souls and more to come. Here's the interview I did
with Manu Lehtinen. You started Little Rose Productions as a mail-order company in Finland featuring Christian metal and as a music label. Why? Well, I think the biggest reason for that was that there wasn't any. We have one big Christian Music distributor in Finland but they have very little hard music, and people like Miika (Partala, mpo) and myself were yearning for more Christian music for the Finnish market and that's a big reason for starting the mail-order service and the distribution. And for the label....well, it's been Miika's dream for many years and we thought we could put them together. When did you start it? A bit more than a year ago. Back in winter, late winter 1998. How is then the scene in Finland? If you mean the Christian scene, it's very well at the moment. It's growing all the time, new bands coming up. And we have many good Christian metalbands. We have signed a few of them and are planning to release their full-length albums. Well, the secular scene has always been very big in Finland. There are even many metalbands that hit to the Top Forty when they release a new album. Are there opportunities to play live for the bands in Finland? Yes, we do and we are getting more opportunities by the time. Finland is such a small country with so few people living in Finland that it's not very easy to get really much gigs even though you're a secular band. So, that's a big problem. But not too big. And people are getting more active again. They want to make things like organizing concerts and stuff like that. And that's good. Does Little Rose Productions have a positive impact on the scene as a binding factor? Yeah, I think so. We've got pretty much cooperation with our company and our bands in Finland. And we made this Finnish metal compilation, From Kaamos To Midnight Sun last fall and that's been a very good thing and after that compilation people have gotten more interested in doing things because they see they can get something made. Many bands are working together, playing concerts together and things like that. You're only doing Christian metalbands. Is there interest in your bands from the Finnish secular scene? There is some interest. We have been sending promo-copies to secular magazines in Finland and secular radioshows and they got airplay and pretty good reviews. So, I believe when people are knowing us better we will have a good influence to the scene and it depends a lot on if we can get a good distribution in Finland. At the moment we are planning to start our own distribution, also to the secular scene in Finland so that we get our releases and other cool Christian stuff from other countries to the normal secular stores. I heard about a magazine in Finland called Suomi Finland Perkele. Do they have interest in you by interviews and things like that? This far they've made reviews of our releases and they've been pretty good. They also have reviewed some other Christian bands like Eso-Charis and Dust Eater Dogs. Bands like that and they got pretty good reviews. Even though the name of the magazine is pretty hard. Perkele means devil in the Finnish language. They are not a black metal magazine but more like a metal magazine in common. Is there interest from abroad to Little Rose Productions? Yes, there is. We have just signed a distribution-deal for the Italian secular market for a big Italian distributor. So, if everything goes like it should, our releases should be in Italian record stores soon. And we're also close to sign a distribution-deal with Massacre, mail-order, Metal Merchant. And some other too. What futureplans do you have? We will release, or, I should say re-release the Dissection album from Crimson Thorn sometime in late summer. The next release will be at our new side-label Rose In The Nose Records which is a hardcore-punk label. We have signed a good Finnish rapcore band, Jacks Of All Trades. They're a very talented young band and we will release their full-length album this fall. Then we will release the full-length albums from Mordecai and Immortal Souls sometime in late 1999 or early 2000. |
