Jori Hulkkonen got his start creating tracks in Oulu, northern Finland, on the banks of the Baltic Sea. With the electronic scene non-existent in that remote area in the early ’90s, he contacted F Communications, the label headed by Laurent Garnier, who had impressed him during a stopover in Helsinki. The French label released his Selkäsaari Tracks in two parts, and would release his work until 2008, bringing an international aura to his mind-blowing techno, a true homage to the Underground Resistance with a Nordic twist. “You know, in Finland, we live for months without sun, the ambience is rather sad and gloomy, people are very introverted. All of that is evident on the album”, he explains. He would maintain that approach and sound throughout his career at F Com (The Spirits Inside Me (1998), When No One is Watching We are Invisible (2000), Different (2002)) accenting the atmospheric side, blending in New Wave and sometimes even pop influences, and inviting in singers like Sweden’s José González for the icy samba Blinded by Numbers on the album Dualizm. And the older this accomplished DJ gets, the less he thinks of the dancefloor, as he explained when Simple Music for Complicated People was released in 2018. “There are no obviously DJ-friendly tracks. It’s more the kind of album you listen to over a glass of wine in your living room as you contemplate the inevitable collapse of Western civilization.”
Soaring in popularity thanks to his countless remixes and re-edits in the 2000s (more than 600, from González to Michael Jackson, including Chic, Stevie Wonder and Swedish group Ace of Base, a strangely cool dub version of All That She Wants under the pseudonym Chuck Norris), Todd Terje (pronounced terrier) quickly succeeded countrymen Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas as the herald of Nordic disco-house thanks to the smash success of his house track Inspector Norse in 2012, composed on an old 1970s synth and released on essential label Smalltown Supersound, based in Oslo. That hit was followed by his first – and to date, only – full-length, It's Album Time, featuring Bryan Ferry, the singer lured in by his remix of a Roxy Music track. A die-hard remixer (almost all of his EPs feature them), Terje continued to dig into the past with Maskindans in 2017, a decidedly Kraftwerkian track released in the ’80s by Norwegian group Det Gylne Triangel, whom he invited to re-record it with a less dark, more groovy and joyous ambience – the Todd Terje trademark.
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