Aavepyörä emerged from the live action roleplaying circles of Helsinki sometime in the late 90s. In the beginning there were a lot of members, some of who did not even make music actually. All of the music up to around 2008 was made in various tracker software. All of the albums up to Ötökkömanifesti are mainly the work of Samu, Jani, Heikki & Kim, who were the main active members.

We had very varying musical tastes and styles, and thus the old releases are very eclectic. We wanted to keep it that way, but since two members (Samu & Kim) also wrote goa music, a side project called Summamutikka was created. Around 2002 other members became inactive, and AVP practically came a solo project of Kim Åke. Summamutikka was also abandoned at that time, and various derivations of trance became the main style of Aavepyörä. As the 2000s went on, Aavepyörä came strongly indentified with the so-called Finnish trance scene, altough our original intention was always to keep a clear distance to that for various reasons.

We believed a lot in free information, and most of us had at least a strong fascination with squatting, anarchism and similar ideas of freedom and solidarity. We were also influenced by the demo scene tracker music culture with open architecture songs available to everyone (that to this day has not happened in any other scene). We made CDrs selling them for no profit, and in 2002 created a website giving all the music away for free. This was actually quite exceptional at the time, since especially the more “serious” musicians were quite jealous about their music, hoping to score a publishing deal. Soon other more famous free music sites opened elsewhere too. Our music has also always been released under a Creative Commons license, and we have always been free of all collecting societies and similar agencies.

And since this always comes up: I (Kim) have never used any drugs or even been drunk for that matter. This is actually a big issue for me, and the main problem I´ve always had with the psytrance scene, up to the point that these days I feel pretty bad about even performing in parties sometimes when I see people damaging themselves and the drugs in general creating a pretty unhealthy atmosphere. Each to their own, but I just wanted to make my stance clear, since I hear alwasy these crazy rumors and know there are big misconceptions about this.