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Almost a month ago me and Eugene started to plan a trip to the country-side, thinking it would be a nice quiet place to finish our compositions for the upcoming album. Well, we took vacation from our offices and started to crawl through our phonebooks, hoping to find a kind person who would accomodate us to his/her cabin for a few days. Free of charge of course. Maybe we were a bit idealistic and out of luck (we won 20 euros from a pokerslot-machine earlier the same week). The plan didn't work and no-one agreed in our conditions. So here we were, out of job for a few days, and we decided to have a nice country-side-themed weekend in the city. In our nice little cabin near the centrum of Helsinki.
The songs take their time. That's why usually the first hours goes on playing all the crappy ideas out of your system. In this case it took the whole first day. I was still finishing the mixes of the africa-demos when Eugene finally arrived into the resort. We started playing quite late and no songs did appear on our minds or our fingers clearly. So I realized that the best thing to do was to go and check-out the local night-life of this exotic northern city. It was fun. I ended up at this art-school party near our accomodation. There played a good band (it was called Asa or something). I danced for a while all though this was not my dancing night. My moves where quite mellow.
The next day everything was better. We had some nice ideas, did one cool song, but then we ran out of cigarrettes. So we went to lend a camera, buy some cigarrettes and checked out the local transportational devices.
Travelling in the Country-side
Saturday night we tryed if our luck had changed and took part at the lottery draw. The win was 6.8 million. Yep, no luck yet. We should have never touched that pokerslot-machine.
The big forest
So sunday came. Everything was going swell, still we were a little late. We wrote a couple of songs and realized that our weekend had been a big succes. Almost all the songs are ready for the album, can't wait to go and try it with the band. We even wrote this one slow, almost classical, really depressing song. It sounds like a battlefield after the battle, a big graveyard. Panthéon.
Soldiers, heroes, husbands and wives, superhero-relationships, russian revolutions etc. are a few themes we've been writing our songs from. We weren't trying to make a theme album(with one fundamental theme that has to be on every song). The songs are quite diffent from each other and from our earlier work. And they are all new. We will be playing them live on may. Maybe release a couple of demos on the internet in a couple of weeks.
So things are going forward and it's all good. We are going to try and write here at least once in two weeks. Stay tuned as our bass player learns how to skate.
-Emil
Almost four months since we have made a public appearance, sort of feels like we ought to get out from our hibernation back to where the sun is. Well, the shoes are being polished, shirts are ironed and what's most important we've spent this whole time writing new songs. Africa -sessions that are somehow awkwardly reported on our domestic ”finglish” are the latter recordings of the two 3-4 song demo preparations for the upcoming task of making an album.
After pimping up with the applegear we've managed to slowly move up in quality from the 4-track c-casette mastepieces through mp3 players to a new headaching comfroting life with garageband. It can do 8 tracks simultaneously, but we can't find the way to record several takes on one track as in protools, so it still is a ”live & learn” for us in the painful way.
So Africa -sessions started out with 7 tracks of drums and bass. Having a killer party celebrating our drummers visit to africa the day before did cause minor shaking, but gladly did not affect any playing skills (I guess we're not on that high level of playing yet). The songs we worked on are currently under the following code names:
Veterans
Superman (orkku)
Hold on
digidii
All four we're recorded pretty tight, but ”veterans” 'caused some wtf experience as we figured we've been playing the song with authenic bpm changes and believe me, garageband was definately not the tool for us to operate that thing. Though we gave it a thought to have the whole thing reprogrammed later on, we settled for the recording only to find how the electrodrums we were thinking of became impossible for us to work on. So it turned out as a quite an upbeat song, with a majestic David-Bowie-backing-vocal thing. I suggest you sit before listening to it, as it'll knock you out 100% guaranteed.
Ever since the battles on our first EP, some of our creativity has puffed out sideproducts that are essential for avoiding different stages of headaches and extrasweat. One of the things I'm definately proud of is the ”scarflistening”, then again I do believe that practicality (?) creates esthetics.
The album is called ”Panthéon” among us for now. I guess we have a thing for ”big things” going on. We have a studio booked for summer, but we're planning to release a single or two before June, we still really don't know what's happening with all the buzz in our ears. But what's important is that we've got new ladies waiting for their nights to shine and some special live dancing activity by Ville Tikka, which all sums to the fact that our few live shows are worth checking out if you're intrested in what we sound like now. Confirmed events are:
21.5 Kuudes linja w/ Lady Escape (who are also coming back from the studio)
1.7 Lepakkomies w/ Delay Trees & Kaskas (Trees have just released Soft Construction EP, which is something you should get your hands on)
Oh yeah, we met a Polish heavy metal band ”ŚMIERĆ” during our sessions, they we're friendly enough to pass us a photo:
While waiting for all the new stuff to emerge, you can visit following places:
http://www.myspace.com/delaytrees
http://www.myspace.com/ladyescape
http://www.myspace.com/rubikband (their upcoming second album out for listening)
http://www.myspace.com/theteamlove (or especially a band called ”a weather”)
And we'll continue climbing up the ladders.
All the love and a pleasant spring awakening for you guys and gals, see you soon!
<3<3<3>
-Eugene
