Cleaning Women

Cleaning Women is an avant-garde band formed in 1996 in Helsinki, Finland. It makes experimental rock and dense music with self-made instruments. The band members write ambitious pieces for clothes drying racks and washing machine drums, but they also provide an entertaining show. Instruments are not the only cause for astonishment at performances of the Cleaning Women. The band's music combines modern dance rhythms, heavy industrial rock, Eastern European folk music, and experimental art music. Enthusiastic listeners have sometimes called it avant-garde disco, sometime techno punk. At the beginning of the new millennium, a new and very idiosyncratic band from Eastern Finland began to cause a stir in Finnish experimental rock circles. The three-man group Cleaning Women combines the open-mindedness typical of Finnish rock with the enthusiasm about technology and technical inventions common in Finland. Despite looking like a gang of sharp and stylish cross-dressing zombies, Cleaning Women is also known for their alternative ways in choosing their instruments. Instead of regular music stores, these professors head for trash bins and home accessory shops in search for "other sounds". And so it must be, as their weapons of choice include string instruments made out of clotheshorses and a drumset that includes parts from at least three washing machines. After their second album, Aelita - The Queen of Mars (2005), Cleaning Women has been busy in composing live soundtracks to silent movies and touring around the globe. During the years they have become somewhat a household name for Middle European festival promoters searching for a little more challenging sound from Finland. Their latest success was when the band performed a soundtrack for the film Aelita - The Queen of Mars for enchanted Luxembourg Philharmonie Hall audience. http://www.cleaningwomen.com Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.