Our five year celebration has finally been celebrated. Last Saturday at the Utopia Club in Turku the audience was warmed up by the masters of ceremony Maria Pettersson, Toivo Haimi, and our association’s own stars Rane & Co, Kupittaa, Princes of Nigeria and Lawrence. After them it was time to hand over The Most Commendable Artist of the Year in Southwest Finland and The Most Commendable Artist of the Year outside Southwest Finland awards.
The former was given to Lauri “Lawrence” Ståhlberg, who was completely flabbergasted by the attention.
In the justification the award sub-committee noted, among other things: “Lawrence is a confident wordsmith and lyricist. We also appreciate his self-ironic approach – which is a very typical way of seeing things here in Southwest Finland. That and the sense for absurdity ties Lauri’s modern lyrics to the long underground culture tradition in the Turku area.”
The Most Commendable Artist of the Year outside Southwest Finland award was given to Maria Mattila, known as the guitarist and the singer-songwriter of Mara Balls. Maria wasn’t able to attend the occasion herself, so her representative, Mara Balls dancer Emma Majava received it instead.
The award sub-committee explained their choice with these words: “Komitea appreciates both Maria’s proudness in walking her own path as an artist, her ambition and her boldness to bring up mental health issues to the public discussion by her own example. In addition to that, Maria is a wide-ranging grassroots culture activist in Tampere – a bit like Komitea in Turku. We feel deep soul connection to Maria, and therefore we are proud to award her.”
The sweaty, thumpy and noisy gig by Ronskibiitti ended the night. (As a deception, Kupittaa is depicted in the photo above.)
Ended, schmended… some of us got stuck at the Utopia backstage until wee hours.
That’s all, folks.
PS: The Komitea compilation still hasn’t arrived to neither Spotify nor Apple Music. We’re in the process of figuring out, what the hell happened in the publication. You’ll find the album on several other digital music platforms, though, and of course you can buy it as a cd too. We hope that we’ll be able to get the compilation to all the digital channels by the end of the week.