Something about the company

The first form of what later would become Hiljaiset Levyt was kicked off early 1980s, when Jukka Junttila started up yet another self financed magazine. Magazine was called Hiljainen Kesä (Silent Summer in English) and its' first - and only - number was meant to summarize memories of one silent summer, but as usually is the case with self financed magazines, it didn't happen so.

Hiljainen Kesä formed out to be an underground overall magazine and it drag along other people too - at least when it was time to go to a pub.

More and more people get involved and the most important of them was Sari Jormanainen. With her Junttila developed an idea to expand the magazine to do other sorts of cultural things too and so Hiljainen Kulttuuriyhdistys (Silent Culture Association in English) was registered in 1985.

Hiljainen Kulttuuriyhdistys started out by publishing Finnish comics, but it was just matter of time when they expanded to records and Hiljaiset Levyt -label (Silent Records in English) was founded in 1986.

At the beginning these two frustrated pop freaks, Mr. Jukka Junttila and Miss Sari Jormanainen, put out one or two LP's and a handful of singles per year. Normally their pace of releasing records took up in the early autumn and in winter, when the student loans could be cashed.

To the amazement of all - especially to Jukka's - things started to work out and the amount of releases started to grow. In 1990 things had become a little more serious and even more people got involved with this funny little enterprise. Hiljaiset had got a major distribution in Finland, some of the records were licensed to USA, UK and Germany, bands started to tour in Europe and the records get better and better.

It was the point where Hiljaiset Levyt should start to run either more professionally or stop the whole thing. They chose some sort of amateur professionalism and Hiljainen Osakeyhtiö (Silent Ltd. in English) was established. Ltd continued to release records and the other publishing was left to Kulttuuriyhdistys.

Even though Sari left the country and left the scene totally, things started to roll faster and faster. More bands where signed, more records put out and Hiljaiset Levyt became one of the biggest indie record company in Finland.

Now Hiljaiset Levyt is not-so-small, powerful indie label in Finland. It's oriented to different kinds of guitar rock - Hiljaiset believes there is more than one way to use guitar, and they gonna show you them all.


Main Staff

• Jukka Junttila (MD, A&R)
• Rainer Vallius (marketing)

Distribution

MNW


HILJAISET LEVYT
P.O. Box 211, FIN-33201 Tampere, FINLAND
Fax: Int +358-3-3165770
E-mail: hiljaiset@hiljaiset.sci.fi

In USA you can contact:
NKVD Records [Steve Gardner]
P.O. Box 60369, San Diego, CA 92166, USA
E-mail: nkvd@interserv.com