Like Taanila, Anton Nikkilä was a member of the legendary Helsinki low-fi noise group “Swissair”. His father Reijo, one of Finland's most famous television journalists, spent many of his professional years as a foreign correspondent in the USSR. Anton was infected by his father's love for the gigantic neighboring country - today he is one of the best connoisseurs of Russian video art.
Nikkilä & Taanila's AV album The Double - Russian Industrial Music & Low-Tech Videos (1993) is one of the earliest results of their efforts in this culture: an anthology of music videos, created shortly before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, realized with video equipment of the more affordable kind, for formations that can be loosely subsumed under the term “industrial”. Nikkilä & Taanila achieved two things with this pop-cultural-ethnological masterpiece: on the one hand, they were able to preserve a piece of commercial art, and on the other, they documented a historical moment in an absolutely extraordinary way.
