Roshi
It was about 500 CE when a guy called Boddhidharma started a long and heavy journey from India over the Himalayas towards China. He carried with him a rare collection of Buddhist texts to get them there where people were still unaware of the Buddhist teaching of emptiness.
About 1500 years after this happened, sometimes in the late 1980´s, in the small and distant country of Finland young Kristo Tuomi a.k.a Roshi started to experiment with a synthesizer and as he himself remarks, flipped out totally with the instrument.
The first love soon evolved into making trance and hard core sounds. As he grew up a bit the straight beat trance was left behind to be substituted with more interesting rhythms and soundscapes of drum ´n´bass, breakbeat and such. As he himself states, there was no other choice for him but to make music. And music happens in the audiences´ reaction on good tunes.
Roshi, formerly also known as Monk, has been a visible figure in the Finnish jungle scene for almost ten years. Around the millennium Roshi started with his friend Robin Grotenfelt the project Koe. They released one of the first drum n bass albums in Finland in the year 2002 on Exogenic Breaks Records. After Koe was left to wait for the better days to come he has been involved in the Stealth Unit Sound Collective and project Roshi and the Junkmen. Currently he is also working with breakbeat influenced band The Jar. He has releases also on other labels besides Exogenic Breaks, such as Nine2Five Recordings and Botchit Breaks.
Even thou Roshi is already familiar from the Koe circles, the new solo project will be a fresh start for him and he is currently working on his debut album. After having made music on various genres his first self arranged long play will be out of the reach of genre stamps having only the peculiar feature, as Roshi himself states, of being something similar to stoner breaks and taking strong influences from drum n bass and rock. The upcoming album will feature notorious artists such as Redrama, Tuire Lukka (Pooma), Jere Garcia (Accu), Lacce (Accu), Jan Rechberger (Amorphis, All Human Substitutes) and Jasse Kesti (Possible Apple, German Electronics).
And the guy Boddhidharma? Well, he made his way to China and established there a Buddhist order of Chan, which was later to become Zen in Japan. And without Zen there would be no Roshi, as the name means a respected Zen teacher or anyone who calls himself by that name and manages to get everyone else to do the same.