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Like most people who have had their eyes melted by his work, I'm pretty sure that the first time I was exposed to Ilkka Vekka's visual art was through one of his releases with his psychedelic industrial noise/drone project Haare. The majority of Haare's tapes, discs and 7"s bear Vekka's signature style of acid-damaged collage and ghoulish death imagery, giving them a unique visual language that synchs up perfectly with the dense, deafening walls of blackened noise and factory-floor cacophony that he summons from out of some black hole. Vekka's artwork has also been popping up in other places within the underground noise/metal realm recently, such as the eye-popping covers that were commisioned for the Finnish noise magazine Special Interests in 2010. Like the artwork on the Haare releases, these covers are kaleidoscopic blasts of color and geometric figures and occult symbology that feel as if they are drawing equally from both the psychedelic poster art of 60's artists like Martin Sharp and Barney Bubbles, and the stark high-contrast nightmare imagery found within the cassette covers and Lp sleeves of 80's industrial culture. It's a potent fusion of messy psychedelia and corrosive cut-up images that Vekka has developed.
This zine collects a number of Vekka's pieces, and is divided into roughly two sections. The first focuses on all new black and white collage pieces that appear here for the first time; the second half of the chapbook features a number of album cover details and Haare-related art, including a couple of full-color reproductions. All of these lysergic visions gathered together here are deranged, hallucinatory and visually intoxicating, and are only a small portion of the ever growing body of work that Ilkka Vekka continues to create. The thirty-eight page zine includes an index of the art pieces, a partial Haare discography, and comes in a black hand-numbered envelope printed with the black Ilkka Vekka logo, a set of vinyl stickers, and a set of four full-color 1" badges. Released in a limited edition of 100 copies.
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