News entries for the year 2002
30.12.2002 A couple of days of repairing and I still haven't got all the details worked
out but now we have the doors at least open, boys and girls. Insert your comments to the guestbook.
New 30 second clips of every damn track on the album are now to be checked out from
audio-section.
The radio interview supposedly came out today so if you missed, you missed it. Now I'm off
to rehearse tomorrow's Sugarrush New Year's extravaganza, so ta ta for now.
27.12.2002 It feels like a long time since the last update and it's really been only a week. So what's been going on? A lot, I guess, most noteworthy happening being our "Happiness" release gig last Friday. Everyone said it was a fine gig although I begged to differ but who cares what I think if the audience likes it. We had some pictures I had made the very same day projected on the backdrop which worked better than I had thought even if Julius - who had not seen the pics before the gig - almost burst into laughter when he saw the cowboy motif I had made for "The Passenger". For me the high points of the gig were our new version of "Demons" - we're thinking of recording it for a future release - and the encore cover of Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called To Say I Love You". The setlist for the gig can be found here. In between celebrating X-mas and being caught with the flu we've also managed to take care of a deejay stint for Club25 personnel's private Christmas party, an interview regarding "Happiness" for RadioVaasa and also some rehearsing for the Sugarrush's now traditional New Year's gig. Oh yeah and if you've not realised it yet, we've re-done the design for these pages. Hope you like it, we're still checking links and fixing cross-browser shit so be patient, dear friends.
20.12.2002 It's out now. "Happiness". Fourteen songs to kiss your lover's belly to. We have a gig tonight at Vaasa's Club25 to celebrate this occasion to which you are more than welcome. Also the gentlemen of Velvetcut will appear on stage in their full glory. End transmission.
19.12.2002 Get your orders in, dear children! "Happiness" is now available to order so get your momma's purse, borrow 12€ and send it over to the your uncles at Nature Sucks Anyway Records. Further info on ordering is available from the shop-section. I must admit to being tired as fuck by now because of all the stuff that had to be done to get the record released so it sure was rewarding to finally see the damn discs yesterday. And it still sounded good, we're both really pleased with the thing, Julius and I. That should be enough evidence that you should get it now. And if you're still not convinced, we're putting up clips of songs in here in the next few days so you can judge for yourselves. Enough of the advertising bullshit, yesterday was also a day for a rehearsal and a damn fine rehearsal it was, too. We ran through the songs two times and on the second round it just all fell into place really, really nicely. I just have to say that the new version of "Demons" we've got just sends shivers down my spine, I just hope the feeling transfers into the audience too. In between this and that I also got a new song on my tape recorder, lacking lyrics of course.
18.12.2002 The sleeves were given thumbs up and they're travelling through the cogs of the printing machine as we speak. Also on yesterday's agenda was further graphic work on an advertisement poster for "Happiness" to be distributed in Vaasa and also some sketching of the future layout for this site. You can peep the ad here. The discs themselves should be arriving later on today, so quite possibly we'll have the discs available already tomorrow - the most eager of you could try Vaasa's Anttila TopTen or Kråklund Records.
17.12.2002 Finally finalized the sleeves yesterday and today we're going to check out the test print, quality control ya see. Other activities for yesterday included a couple of acoustic numbers that I did at this private party, I was pressured into doing that once again although I don't like doing that kinda things at all. It's just not my kinda scene, the people are so close and stuff. Anyway, it went okay, I played "Stifle" and covered Radiohead's "Motion Picture Soundtrack" - fitting songs to the X-mas spirit, huh? Bugger off, I interpreted with a Christmassy touch, okay?
16.12.2002 A lot of rehearsing this past weekend. First it was Friday night's Sugarrush rehearsals I attended which streched way into the wee hours. Quite a fun session, after Paati had to leave on some business we tried out new songs and played with some peculiar line-ups. Saturday dragged Graceskull into the rehearsal quarters for the first time in a long while. I guess some uneasiness was abound since the break had been that lengthy but there were truly some fine moments sprinkled in there, the two peaks being our new version of "Demons" and a cover tune we jammed on a bit - it's a real joy to play, though laughing made it a bit difficult at times. I really can't out the title right now, it would kill the element of surprise if we decide to play it. Sorry. After the rehearsals my guitar made a brief appearance in the hands of our former bass-meister El Tero-Teró at this fund-raiser concert where also Andy and Coma got on stage to perform a rocking version of the Twisted Sister classic "We're not gonna take it". All in all the whole concert was surprisingly good (I had my hopes veeery low after the last year's terrible event) a definite highlight being a rendition of another hard rock song - Guns'n'Roses' "Sweet Child O'Mine" - by an all-girl tag team of Creamstar's Hannah and her friend Linda. That was some gawddamn fine singing right there, I tell you no lie. Another fine moment of the night was brought to us courtesy of Finnair since Ilkka had flown back from England for the Christmas, we get to keep his hairy face here for some three weeks before the Britons claim him back. On Sunday I tried to get the damn sleeves finished but didn't quite make it, I sincerely hope I'll have them in check tonight since the CD's should be arriving tomorrow.
13.12.2002 Things are at a standstill right now, just waiting for the records to arrive from the pressing plant. We picked the photo we're gonna use for the sleeve and I guess the remaining finishing touches to the sleeves are done tonight. Jocke has also finally gotten his fingers out of the cast so a rehearsal session should occur in the near future too.
11.12.2002 Keeping still pretty busy, this time on the visual side of things. First off we have the X-mas gig's poster uploaded and ready, click here to have a look. Then also this and that has happenend with the sleeves and we're proud to have a preview of the cover right here. "Happiness" has also now been added to the discography section with the appropriate info. Yesterday we also had the up'n'coming photo talent FLB behind the camera for the pics that will end up on the sleeves. The unused material of those sessions will appear here probably next week so stay tuned.
09.12.2002 Hallelujah, boys and girls, it's finished! After five days of straight up
mixing and mastering to the wee hours o' the morning, we completed the record yesterday at around seven o'clock.
It was 10 to seven, if my memory serves me right, to be precise. At that time there were
several versions of some songs while others were aced with only one try, amazingly "Dark Don't
Care" proved to be one of the most difficult ones to get right even though it probably has
less tracks than any other song on the record. And you can forget the shit I babbled last
Thursday about album lengths, we decided not to give a fuck and it now totals at 54 minutes.
And now having had a couple of listens, it really doesn't feel too long, I'd like to think
that there's enough stuff happening there to keep the listener from shutting the stereo off halfway
between the record. And if anyone disagrees with that, at least they should bear with us to
hear the closing lullaby of "Trains Pass By", I'm extremely proud of how it turned out.
Anyway, the master is getting shipped to the pressing plant today and they've promised a
week's delivery time so the tentative release date has been set to December 20th (that's when
we have the gig at Club25 too, you know). That means you still get the chance to give your
mother the X-mas gift she's been waiting for all year, it'll probably appear on the shelves of
Vaasa's Anttila TopTen but also will be available for pre-order from next week onwards so
keep your pants on, rest of the world. Next week there might be something happening on
this site too because we'll try to get a few changes done whilst working on the sleeves for the
disc. Enough of the bullshit already, here's the tracklist:
1. Dark Don't Care
2. Not That Fast
3. The Building Blocks of Falling Apart
4. Last of the Secrets
5. Snowflake Pt.1
6. Outside
7. Push
8. Night Falls
9. I Should Know By Now
10. The Kid With Fiery Eyes
11. Surrender
12. Morning Came
13. Snowflake Pt.2
14. Trains Pass By
05.12.2002 A exhaustive day of mixing yesterday. We started things off by noticing that the computer had erased most of the tracks we had mixed thus far, so we had to do the mixes for "Building Blocks" and "Dark Don't Care" again. The tracks for "Push", "Snowflake Pt.1" and "Outside" were also erased but we reckoned the versions we have now just need mastering and they're good to go, so "Not That Fast" is the only one of the missing ones we have to start mixing from the start. We also completed (changes are always possible, mind you) mixes for "I Should Know By Now", "Last of the Secrets" and "Kid With Fiery Eyes" which left me aching for sleep. Julius apparently had done some mastering after I left for some shut-eye, I guess tonight I'll get to hear what he has come up with. One thing that now puzzles my mind is the fact that the seven songs we now have finished add up to nearly 40 minutes already and I don't know if I want the album to be over 50 minutes so some tunes will probably be cut if we can't find a way to make the record work with possibly over an hour's worth of stuff.
04.12.2002 Julius had operated on "Kid With Fiery Eyes" and gotten it into shape by dropping the guitars more than was our original plan so final mixing of also that tune is pretty near. He had also made an order on some new module too but I think that the thing isn't really relevant until the next release we put out. I worked on the "Greenhouse Song"'s lyrics some more and I think the verses are pretty much done now, the chorus doesn't quite exist yet so that has to wait.
03.12.2002 Movement in the graphics department yesterday, worked on the poster for the December 20th gig with Velvetcut. I think I'll have it ready and uploaded for your viewing pleasure later this week.
02.12.2002 Friday saw us getting down to some serious mixing and come midnite we had six songs ready to go ("Building Blocks", "Snowflake pt.1", "Push", "Dark Don't Care", "Not That Fast" and "Outside"). Julius had obtained a massive amount of Gimmel-badges earlier that day which we used as kind of prizes, we attached one to the chest of our shirts every time we finished a song which proved to be a good method. We also made a promise not to remove any of the badges before we got the record wrapped, let's just see how long that promise holds up. After "road-testing" the mixes in numerous places we realised what had to be done (basically checking vocal levels and evening out the lower frequencies) in terms of mastering etc. so it was most helpful with also the to-be-mixed songs in mind. On Sunday we spent the evening in company of the Sugarrush boys, they played records and an acoustic set over at DOM (where I seem to be spending a great deal of my Sundays nowadays, luckily I have the timer function on my VCR so I haven't missed any WWF programming). Lots of great songs both on stage and off, boys and girls, you should've just been there.
29.11.2002 Julius has continued his work with the mixes and has gotten "Push" and "Not That Fast" apparently in decent shape but small amount of frustration has been detected with the others. He reported that every time he thinks he has a tune in check, there's some minor stuff going on which takes the shit to nearly square one - square three, at least. Like the last few days, yesterday also sprung out new material on my part (just some minor ideas again) but I also recorded a demo of "Bring Me Love" which is now available right here (and also stored in the audio-section as usual).
28.11.2002 Another day of minor songwriting, I was happy to get a more of a melancholy vibe to at least one of the tunes, I've been writing such happy-happy-joy stuff lately that it was about time. I'm hoping to have time to go through my idea tapes during the Christmas holidays and maybe get a couple of real fully fledged songs out of them but we'll just see how this plan works out.
27.11.2002 Luckily Julius is still set on this record and deeply so, he had rough-mixed and grouped tracks of all the songs except "Kid With Fiery Eyes" and "Trains Pass By" yesterday. According to him the constant polishing we've done has kinda paid off since the sounds are very much in place already and this only leaves us with slider duties (getting this and that sound to get through the other noise). Meanwhile back in the Ritola residence some little parts of new songs slipped out of my guitar.
26.11.2002 Dabbling with lyrics a little yesterday in between dishwashing and other immensely rock'n'roll activities. I've had this little idea going on in my head since our car ride to Turku when we saw these greenhouses on the side of the road and they were lit so bright that even the clouded sky was colored by the shine. It brought on this strange sensation when it was basically in the middle of nowhere, dark as fuck otherwise but then there was this big box with a couple of billion lumens worth of starshine spread from it all the way to the clouds. It made me think of certain things and draw some analogies which usually means a song is underway. I know this all sounds like a giant heap of art-fag bullshit but I'm just being honest, boys and girls. So that must make me an art-fag bullshitter then. Anyway I'm adapting the idea into this pretty old tune we've had in the development process and in my head it's starting to sound pretty good. So I've already got my mind set on the next record even though we haven't got this one wrapped yet.
25.11.2002 After a brief and somewhat tired rehearsal Friday night we got on the road to Turku Saturday afternoon with the car packed with equipment to its fullest. After about five hours' drive with an amp on my lap we arrived to Pikku Torre which was a pub-ish little venue downtown Turku. The gig itself was okay, I guess, I mean we've had better ones. Julius had some trouble with the equipment (crackling cables etc.) at first and then there were a few playing mistakes here and there also. However we got some nice response after the performance so I think no one in the audience suffered too much. After our gig we enjoyed a set by A Spokane and drew superheroes with our drive-tech FLB (he draws a mean Spider-Man, I tell ya). The after hours provided some stupid stuff as usual but also some quality time before probably one of the best pizzas I've ever had, in Pizzaria Papa. After some record shopping (Beth Gibbons solo debut is highly recommended, especially the mind blowingly beautiful opening track "Mysteries") we drove back up to Vaasa, had about a second of shut-eye and found ourselves in DOM where Jukka Kujansivu and Janne Laurila threw acoustic sets, one each. Their stuff proved mucho suitable for a tired Sunday evening and Mr. Laurila's nursery rhyme encore was the perfect closer for the event, no doubt about it. But it really wasn't the closer for the evening though since after those gigs me and Andy J. still had the errand of playing a one song set in El Gringo bar down the street. The song was Teenage Fanclub's "Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From" and we played it to this friend of ours, Miia, who's leaving our little ol' town of Vaasa to work in Helsinki. A tear or two - or a bucket - were shed which once again proved the power of music, the song had a certain history to her and I hope that despite the tears it was more a pleasant surprise than not. Take over the capitol, Miia and take care! The setlist for the Turku gig can be found over at the setlists section as you probably though it would.
20.11.2002 New equipment news. Julius had gotten himself a new keyboard (I guess for midi-use but with real wooden keys and all) as an early delivered X-mas gift. I haven't seen it yet but he said that the feel was far better than with other similar instruments he's come across. So with no words about the aesthetics of the thing, it must be boss ugly, hurhur.
19.11.2002 We worked on so many songs yesterday that I probably forgot half but at least under the knife were "Surrender", "Last of the secrets", "Morning Came" and "Push". I know I made a revelation about having done all the recordings already but we did record new vocals for both "Secrets" and "Surrender" and some bass-y organ tracks on "Morning came". I'm pretty certain - again - that now we have it all. The only tune we still have clipping and arranging stuff to do now is "The Kid with Fiery Eyes" which Julius declared he'd do by himself. Then it's mixing time which is probably going to be a helluva job but if we've managed this far I guess we can cope with that.
18.11.2002 Well, apart from the extensive Friday night studiowork, I got jack shit done this last weekend. Mainly we worked on "Building blocks" which is the song with the most tracks on it so it took a lot of time too (even though less than me and Julius thought). We cleaned up hisses, picked the right vocal tracks and mixed it so that it is very nearly done now. Another one of the more difficult-to-mix ones - "The Kid With Fiery Eyes" - was also worked on but only briefly since we were getting tired at that point and it's gonna take some patience to get that fucker sound like we want it to. The primary difficulty in it is to get it build up a certain way, like adding some boost to it in certain points and you can't get there just by turning up the volume. The latest thing we've added to it is a distorted beatbox which seemed to work pretty good. Anyway, after exiting the studio for the day, Julius was compulsive about showing me the new amp he had bought so we hopped in his way below zero temperature Volvo's cockpit and drove down to our rehearsal facility. It truly looked really cool, the amp, and also had surprisingly good sound considering the price Julius had payed for it. We proceeded to jam a while with J-Lo behind the Rhodes and me on the drums which was really nice and even relaxing, I guess. No new instant hits were developed though, but I swear we gave a couple of post-rock bands a run for their money. On Saturday we caught us some Kent live and they put on quite a remarkable show, apart from a couple of half-assed songs that started the gig and the sound which was terrible due to the acoustics of the venue (which was an ice-hockey arena). Especially their lightshow was very well laid out. Also present was Melody Club which also rocked in their gay sense of the word, the drummer especially handled his shit nicely. To end today's entry with some star-studded action, we were dragged to both bands' backstage fest later on that night which, for me at least, proved to be a really uncomfortable place to be (so I headed homewards recordbreakingly early for a Saturday night). Firstly there's the fact that I really can't be that at ease in the company of persons I kinda admire and then there's also the fact that I realised that they probably weren't that excited to get some Vaasa jackasses hanging around their backstage drinking their beer and whatnot. Having been in a similar situation with my own band a couple of times, I can at least guarantee that had we been Kent this would've been the scenario. Although a change in the sex of the jackasses - in both cases - would've probably turned the tables around. Well, it's all just a crapload of speculation now, ain't it.
15.11.2002 Working on new songs yesterday, got lyrics done for the one that was supposed to be called "Names" - it's now called "Another Round" - and also got a couple of new tunes underway. One of the new snippets is a nearly finished song which I really regret not having time to write lyrics for there and then, I'm hoping to get those done this weekend. The lyrics for "Another Round" can be found at the lyrics-section.
14.11.2002 Just some minor site updates today. I deleted some of the demos from our audio-archive since I got a notice from our server's administrator that the space on the machine was running out. The remaining ones were also moved to a faster server so you can enjoy them at a faster downloading rate from now on. Also updated some of my new records to the records-page.
13.11.2002 Back behind the mixing desk again yesterday. Most work was done on "Trains Pass By" where we got the guitars and Rhodes-tracks sorted. It was nice to notice how many nice melodies we have managed to fit into the song, a remark that could also be made about "Building Blocks". Then we got "Dark Don't Care" pretty muched wrapped up, it's sounding just dandy. Another tune that's pretty close to being finished is "I Should Know By Now" which we did a lot of mixing on too. We are going to do the final mix for it in two parts probably since there's a world of difference between the two parts of the song. Some work was also done to "Last of the Secrets" - which may or may not still need new vocals - and "Push" (also one of the very nearly finished ones). Meanwhile Julius had once again stumbled onto some fine vintage equipment, a 70's HH amplifier which he now has made some modifications on to make it look - and maybe even sound - even cooler than it already was. We're hoping it'd make its premiere on the upcoming Turku gig but it's yet to be tested, so we'll get back to you on that subject.
12.11.2002 Somewhere in between last Sunday's football matches on DOM bar's Playstation2 our trusted axe hero Jocke got his two fingers broken in his right hand and thus will not be attending any gigs at least in a month. I've always said that sports games suck, if they'd only been playing Bubble Bobble...Oh well, a speedy recovery is wished upon him by the band. On the update front, I've added a few of Mikko Lappalainen's ancient (from last year, that is) reviews from Sue Magazine to the reviews-section. Thanks for digging them up, Mr. Lappalainen!
11.11.2002 We had quite an active Sunday while Friday and Saturday were mostly spent on entertainment (on Friday we checked out Magyar Posse live at Club25 - a fine show, somekind of post-rock, I suppose - and I dabbled a little with the record sleeves on Saturday but that's about it). First off we started the day with recording hopefully the final takes of guitar to the record, they were done to "I should know by now", "Last of the secrets" and "Make Way". After some meals and some minor moments in slumberland Julius' automobile took us to our rehearsal space where we got the songs for the upcoming Turku-gig sorted. Surprisingly the two songs I thought we'd never play live again after our last gig - that's "Promise" and "The Passenger" - ended both on the setlist and another surprise addition was also "Demons", considering that this is going to be an acoustic gig. The version of "Demons" we did was just fucking marvellous, it's basically a whole new song. It's funny that I never really want to play that song on our gigs but somehow it always ends up on the list anyway. Ending today's fairly short weekend update with a link, there are some nice words about our recent Jyväskylä gig over at Gobipress.net. I also added the passage in question to our reviews-section, check it out.
08.11.2002 A little break from recordmaking on my part yesterday (Julius had continued on cleaning up the tracks, though) as I rehearsed this one cover tune with Andy J. We're supposed to play it on this special occasion in a couple of weeks' time and even though I wasn't really that familiar with the song before, I thought we got it in pretty good shape. Then we proceeded to "jam" for a couple of hours like two guys with acoustic guitars tend to do. Some of it must've sounded terrible (like our cover of Gimmel's "Etsit muijaa seuraavaa" which we played into the Sugarrush's Coma's answering machine) so an apology goes out to my patient neighbors.
07.11.2002 The most hard working men in showbiz continued their journey towards a finished product yesterday with massive mixing, cutting and some singing too. First off we got "Push" and "Kid" into shape so that just a little mixing is needed and then we recorded the vocals for "Night Falls" (our third or fourth attempt but I think we got it this time) and for the chorus of "Not That Fast" which I had managed to fuck up during last Saturday's sessions. We also realised - or Julius did, whatevs - that we need to do the acoustic guitar bits to "I Should Know By Now" again, hopefully this Sunday if Mr. Kulju lets us borrow his beautiful Gibson again. After that we should pretty much have all the recordings wrapped.
06.11.2002 Let's start things off with some real news; Graceskull is invading Turku in a couple of weeks' time, on Saturday 23rd that is. We will be appearing alongside A Spokane at the muy excellencio Flavour of the Month club that's held at Pikku-Torre restaurant (Yliopistonkatu 30) and hosted by the infamous Finnish pop scene mastermind Rhythm Barrel (also a fine record label, check it out). I guess we're sticking with the three man line-up for the gig since it worked hella good tha last time and apparently the venue does not bare much resemblance to Wembley, at least size-wise. Meanwhile back in Vaasa, I got a soundfile in the mail from Vapaapudotus' Myyrä yesterday which contained a rough idea what his "Demons" remix is going to be like and in a word, I thought it was just fantastic. He had transformed the tune into a laid back, summer breezy, even r'n'b-ish version that kinda reminded me of that P. Diddy single "I need a girl" (in the best possible way, boys and girls). I guess we're re-doing the vocals for it since he had had to time stretch them so they sounded a bit peculiar. This once again got me a bit excited about the remix record. I'm pretty sure we are going to only release it as an EP with only five or six tracks that fit on the same record which might mean leaving some mixes out but those will appear somewhere, sometime in one form or the other, so dontcha worry. After listening to the remix umpteen times I proceeded to the studio where Julius had already been working the material since breakadawn. We laid out vocals for "Push" and "The Kid With Fiery Eyes" and they went surprisingly good. "Kid" got its fair share of odd falsetto stuff in the choruses which I had a hard time doing since it was really difficult to keep from laughing. We also meant to do the vocals for "Morning Came" but realised that the demo vocal was so good that there was no need to do it again, so we just added some harmonies and stuff at the end of the song. We also did some cutting and minor mixing which Julius continued on with swifter strokes late into the night (and he had woken up really early today to get even more stuff done, the workaholic).
05.11.2002 Julius has continued mixing and stuff and also contemplating the tracklisting - a task which also has now fully employed my brain. I guess we're pretty certain about 80 per cent of the order and the songs but there are a couple of tricky songs/spots on the record which we're not sure about. Yet, that is, I'm sure we'll figure it out by the time we've got the mixes done. I also worked on the lyric writing project some more and am nearly finished with one song, just missing bits and pieces here and there.
04.11.2002 Last weekend's main event was Saturday's studio session which left both me and Julius very happy. We only did singing tracks which came out very nicely indeed, the beautiful winter day provided just the right kind of mood. Worked on tracks were "Trains Pass By", "Dark Don't Care", "Not That Fast" and "Building Blocks" (by which time my voice was completely shot from doing the falsetto harmonies so we had to stop). Now we have I guess three more songs that are missing or in need of new vocals which we are hoping to do this week, unfortunately it's just that those are the tough ones, at least "Push" and "The Kid With Fiery Eyes", so I really have to work myself to get those out of me. Julius also has been mixing eagerly, apparently he got the mix for "Not That Fast" done in the extremely wee hours late Saturday night after we'd witnessed Firevision and Kemopetrol live on stage (Firevision were hella good and Kemopetrol, while efficient, were a bit dull). He'd also played around with the vocals harmonies on "Building Blocks"' chorus and at least when he played it to me over the phone it was beginning to sound like we had a choir going on in there or something. So it probably is a good time to admit that we've encoutered some minor hints of delusions of grandeur within the band on this record. Yeah, I know in the end it's just two jerks making some little songs in their goddamn bedroom but hey, some minor delusions never hurt anyone, hurhur.
01.11.2002 Had a sudden surge of inspiration and did the layout for the cover of "Happiness" last night. After getting some positive feedback from Julius I sketched out basically all the graphics on the sleeve and the disc. All we need now is a decent picture of us in the inner sleeve and of course the texts etc. But this took a decent sized weight off my shoulders since I had been dwelling in ideas that I knew wouldn't look good enough and didn't exactly go with the music either. Julius is trying to find out if we can use some special material on the sleeves which'd make them even nicer but it's still very uncertain whether we can get it or not and whether it will work. In the meanwhile Julius has also been cleaning up the songs (deleting unnecessary tracks, cutting away useless bits and rough mixing) so that we can start the singing part of the recording process which tentatively is happening tomorrow. On a sidenote I also continued work on the lyrics department for the song Firevision's Mikko gave me to work on but I only got a couple of satisfactory lines down on the paper, hope I have more time during the weekend. Also some minor work was done on the guitar since just before I dozed off to sleep I wrote a little intro/verse thing that I luckily also got on tape since I didn't have a clue how it went when I woke up. It still sounded pretty nice in the morning which always is a a good sign, sometimes the late night strums tend to be just insanely distasteful because the limits get lowered the more tired one gets.
31.10.2002 Having had a couple of days' breather from music stuff I had a meeting with Firevision's Mikko about maybe doing some lyrics for some of his songs (he writes songs for their publishing company in addition to the Firevision material). The idea is somewhat intriguing since I haven't done this type of thing before, I just hope I can provide the right kind of lyrics and neither over- or underdo it. I got a couple of song sketches from him and for one of them I even wrote some kind of chorus to already so I guess this type of process might even work.
28.10.2002 Just a warning to those with sleepy eyelids, this is going to be one giant entry. The story begins with our trip to see the WWE Superstars live in action in Helsinki's Hartwall Arena on Thursday. The commercial they had on TV described the event with the word "awesome" and having witnessed the spectacle I have no reason to use any other word - awesome it was, indeed. We made goddamn beautiful oversized signs the night before and waved them around like madmen while screaming and cheering for our favourite wrestlers. Many great stories will remain outside this entry but one of my favourite moments was definitely when my current fave, Rey Mysterio, took a sign picturing the mask he uses that I had made and waved it around the ring with another one of the top men, the Sebastian Bach look-a-like Edge. After the event there was scarcely a squeek left of my (or any one of our) voice which made me a bit worried because we had the gig coming up in two days. Getting back to Vaasa late Friday night, we had a brief rehearsal which didn't amount to much since me and Julius were both too tired to really get our focuses right. My voice was getting better but not really as good as I would have liked, especially the higher notes still seemed to be left back in Hartwall Arena. On Saturday I found myself behind the decks in Papin Nenä, spinning records and shaking asses with Coma, Paati and the people's FLB. It also proved to be a great night, the feedback we got was just fantastic (apart from some minor comments here and there from some folks but who gives a shit) and so was the evening's most played song, Gimmel's "Etsit muijaa seuraavaa" for which we introduced a new innovation called "the non-speaking dj technique" - explanation is just not worth it, let me just admit it was hella stupid but fun nonetheless. On to Sunday then, evening brought us to a party called "Loska" in DOM bar of Vaasa where we played some damn fine autumn-ish records on the turntables and some of our own songs live too. The couple of first hours were invitation only (and dresscode was all black which surprisingly made a fine impact to the athomsphere) during which we played only three songs and at about 23:00 we played ten more - and in between we spinned discs so we had our hands full. Hate to repeat this word again and again but once again some great fun was had and everybody seemed to be really satisfied. So a great ending to a busy but enjoyable week, here are the facts: pictures from Sunday's gig by Aki Karlsson (there are some more here if you're interested), the setlist for the gig and the dj-setlist.
23.10.2002 Rehearsals for Sunday's Loska thingy at DOM yesterday night with just me, Julius and Paati attending. We picked the songs by just playing through a decent pile of them, each adding basically whatever the fuck they came up with in the process so arrangements were rearranged, as they say. And if the arrangements (Paati and Julius playing guitar plus the odd harmonica etc.) were a tad unorthodox, so were many of the songs we played too meaning there are some tunes in the set which haven't been much heard before and may also not be heard again. Not to say that they're crap songs or anything but they just seemed to fit this event. It's nice to have the band as scalable as it is so we can basically do all kinds of different gigs - small and a bit bigger, rockin' and sleepy. Also having a satisfactory amount of songs helps - to put it poetically, each song has its purpose. Even though it was pleasant to play these odd numbers, I must admit that I had a bit of a hard time remebering how to play some of them, like "Make Way" and "Passenger" (this one I probably haven't touched in a year). I just hope I won't fuck 'em up on Sunday.
22.10.2002 Back on the songmaking trail yesterday, I made this one new song with half the lyrics done too, it might be called "Names". Then I completed one of the ditties I came up with last week. This one's called "Bring Me Love" and as corny as the title may suggest the song to be, I'm pretty pleased with it. The lyrics can be found right here.
21.10.2002 Hunting high and low for a car, we finally stumbled on a Chevy van in which we hucked our gear and tired asses early Saturday morning. After a couple of hours, one speeding ticket, a frozen rectum and billion-ish heavy metal classics (not to forget the spins we also gave to a Vaasan blast from the past, Viktor Hurmio & Fetknopparna) we arrived just in time for soundcheck. Having had a good meal and a few hours sleep before the gig we got on stage in good spirits and the outcome was a nice gig, I suppose. The mellow athosphere always works for us and the feedback after the gig was good too. Apparently they taped the gig so I'm hoping to get some audio up here sometime in the near future so you can judge it for yourself. Apart from those with encouraging words, thanks is also due to the arrangers (especially Tuomas) and the deejay for the night - Puny's drummer Kimmo - who kept banging great tunes back to back. The setlist did include two of the newbies, check out the complete list here. On Sunday the aforementioned tired backsides crept back to Vaasa where me and Julius headed down to the secret location to lay down some tracks on a grand piano. The sound of this instrument was just butter and while Julius warmed up with playing "Beautifullest Lie" we came up with the idea that it would be great to do a piano-led gig sometime. Our main objective was to get the piano for "Push" done, which we did, but also laid some tracks on "Building Blocks" and even tried out a piano'n'vocals version of "The Silver Haze" (it didn't work out that perfectly and we ran out of time so it was abandoned).
18.10.2002 I had a minor stroke of inspiration or something yesterday, I think I came up with something like five new ideas for songs in the space of half an hour. One of them was basically a full song but the others were more like something to build on. Unfortunately I was too lazy to write down lyrics to the stuff (although I had some lines going through my head) so they're waiting in the drawer for another inspirational day. And unfortunately, with now 24 hours before we should be on the highway, we still haven't managed to score ourselves a ride for tomorrow's gig. Well this is a rock band, not a car dealership, so what can one expect? One way or the other, we'll get there so see ya tomorrow in Jyväskylä's Ilokivi.
17.10.2002 The final rehearsal before the gig yesterday and what can I say that hasn't been said before? Well not exactly much, because it was fun again and songs went pretty smoothly except for some minor mixups with parts of some songs. It's nice to feel this confident for once, I just hope not too confident and that once we get to Jyväskylä we'll still have the confidence intact. But since there's no need to worry about that kind of things beforehand, we'll end the speculation here. Our drivetech FLB announced this morning that the van we were supposed to get to the gig with had broken down and now he's in search of another ride, I just hope he'll find something that'll fit all six of us in it so that we don't have to travel in two vehicles. First of all, it's not nearly as fun and second, it'd fuck up the economics of the trip. We just have to put our faith in the almighty FLB. Oh yeah, we also got the grand piano recording's time set, it's supposed to go down on Sunday after we get home from the gig.
14.10.2002 Friday night's rehearsal was again very much fun. This
time we started the evening off with 15 minutes' worth of jamming this
"funky riff" with everyone putting every last drop of their white boy soul
into the equation. Later on we decided to call the song "Check this sound"
(I have the whys and whos too but it's far too long a story) and that
we are going to release it as a single which will get the world's collective ass
shaking. Note the sarcasm, please. Naturally not the night's only funny
jam that tune, we also had this 70's rock song and a country'n'western
version of "Trains pass by" to crack us up. The experience that I've had
with playing in bands is that once someone starts playing some funny shit
the others will maybe play along for like a bar or two but with our current
line-up they all just build into real songs with all the crucial parts right
there - it's strange. Strange but lots of fun though. The 70's rock tune,
for example, had the verses and the chorus just right and it even appeared
profitable to some band members:
Ove: "That sounded just like Led Zeppelin!"
Paati: "We should sell the song to them for big money"
Ove: "Well, it probably was a Led Zeppelin song, you know..."
Jocke: "Then they're going to get it cheap!"
Comedy aside, the other songs went just dandy, too. I really like
playing the new songs, we'll see if they end up on the setlist for next weekend's
Jyväskylä gig. I think we have too many songs that we'd like to play
though, so I don't know if we'll add that many newbies into the set. On
Sunday we were back in the studio again and recorded some more acoustic
tracks (actually the last remaining acoustic tracks most likely), this
time to "Not That Fast" and "The Kid with fiery eyes". "Kid"'s acoustics
were played with my nylon striged guitar on which we had an odd effect done
by wrapping a woolen sock around the neck of the guitar. It provided a
nice, raw sound consisting mostly from just hitting the strings and not
really that much of the chords at all. This week we're trying to record
some grand piano we have kind of "booked" but I'm not exactly sure when it's
going to happen. It's kind of an undercover operation since grand pianos
don't exactly grow on trees and on a Nature Sucks Anyway recording budget
we really can't afford to book time in a real studio, so we're hauling
our own equipment to this secret location and doing the recording "on
location". Some real secret agent shit happening right there, for sure.
11.10.2002 We've just done some contemplating on how we'd like the album sleeves to look like and little else during the last couple of days. I hope not too much contemplating though, sometimes you can wreck even the best of ideas by overworking them. I'm pretty certain that we'll end up trying out something very simple and not too well thought out. And maybe we'll also keep the previous record's mood intact, possibly color-wise. But like always, it's nearly impossible to know the final outcome at this point in time.
09.10.2002 We had a little rehearsal with the new still inexplicably unnamed project yesterday. It went a little so-so because firstly my throat was killing me (dry as a motherfucker so half of my already limited vocal range was missing) and secondly because there clearly was some tiredness aboard the crew. We did however get some sense into this new song which was kinda rocking but apparently Paati didn't like that one all that much so I'm not sure whether it will end in the bin or what. And I got the poster date fixed so the link on yesterday's news entry below should appoint you to the corrected version of the friggin' thing. I have to be more careful with the dates from now on, yeah yeah yeah.
08.10.2002 Scribbled together the poster for Loska which is the evening we're playing and deejaying at in DOM at the end of this month. It is at the end of this month even though I've apparently been half asleep when I've written the month down on the poster, a fix is in the works. Check the preview for the poster here.
07.10.2002 Quite a full booked weekend, brother and sisters, but fun nonetheless. The fun started with Friday night's rehearsal which ended in the wee hours. I don't consider myself the kind to brag about stuff that much but the rehearsal was just fantastic, it all sounded great with everyone bringing in their details and arrangements and it felt as if we only played the good songs in our repertoire. We did play a great big heap of songs, I guess somewhere close to 20 or something with a couple of new ones never played with a band before like "Kid with Fiery Eyes" and three days old "Silver Haze". "The Silver Haze" managed to sound damn good for a song that new and it definitely is our most aggressive track yet, especially the closing part is frighteningly near heavy metal. So yeah, I'm still listening to a lot of Queens of the Stone Age. And as nice as it was to have the songs working just right, just as nice was that the gaps between songs were mostly filled with us laughing our asses off for one reason or the other (with Julius knocking over his 50 pound keyboard while practising the rock movements gathering highest levels in the laugh-o-meter, "Saaks lähtee?" indeed). Saturday brought us back to the studio where we recorded electric guitars and some organ stuff with some other bits and pieces too which I might have already forgotten about. Our hands were on at least "Trains Pass By", "Push" and "Building Blocks". At the end of our session while waiting for FLB to come and pick us up to get some grub we even managed to tape this new instrumental song which ended up with the title "The Prairie Circus". To those who've not heard this song, it can only be described with one word; awesome. We had so much fun making it, I'm hoping it will end up on the album or then I'll post it up here at least, it's basically just two minutes worth of silly circus organ, harmonica and of course electrical drilling. It really is one stupid piece of music but it can really cheer one up, a fact which was proved true on Sunday when I dragged my tired ass over to the studio again. Sunday's main goal was to get the remaining acoustic guitar bits done and for this task we borrowed this beautiful Gibson acoustic from the Jocke Kulju axe collections. Not only did it look like a million bucks but the sound was just butter and it was just like trillion times easier to play than any acoustic I've ever laid my hands on, especially my own steel stringed one. It had such fine sound to it that we had no trouble getting that on tape and had the shit wrapped up in an instant. New acoustic tracks were laid to "Trains", "Building Blocks", "Push" and "Kid With Fiery Eyes". We also added this one fuzz guitar thing to "Kid" and played around with this handsome vintage-as-fuck Morley echo pedal Julius had lying around but I don't know whether we got anything worthwhile on tape. Finally I tried to redo the electric guitar bits to "Push" because I wasn't happy with the ones I had done the day before but I was just so damn tired that I decided to pack it in while we still were ahead because I wasn't really going anywhere with my attempts. So right about now the next stage, which is getting the vocals done, isn't that far in the horizon, I guess we'll be on that motherfucker already this week. Jesus, this is one giant news entry, huh? And I'm not even through with it, but there's just this one thing; a christmassy date set for a gig with Velvetcut on December 20th, it surely will be a great evening, dontcha dare miss it!
03.10.2002 Studiowork yesterday. We laid out the guitar for "Morning Came" and got "Building Blocks"' drums on right plus some mixing and stuff. Also tried out guitar for "Trains Pass By" but it really didn't work so we scrapped the takes, I guess we have to put the acoustic guitar in there first before we know what other guitar things are needed. "Building Blocks" also got some guitar on it and I have to tell you the song sounds just terrific, it's very close to being finished too.
01.10.2002 Got a gig confirmed at the DOM bar here in Vaasa on October 27th. First off we'll play some slow, sad and beautiful songs on the decks then do a couple of stripped down songs (it's a small venue so maybe it'll just be me and Julius, we also might have Paati do some percussions, haven't had a talk with him yet) and after the gig we'll continue behind the decks into the wee hours of the night. Surely it'll be quite a pleasant autumn evening, so get your girl (or girl troubles) and drop on by. With the help of some fresh Firevision promo stickers on my guitar I wrote a new song yesterday which I am quite enthusiastic about. The main thing I'm really happy about is that I wrote in my old school way of writing ie. got the whole process in wraps in just under an hour, lyrics and all. I thought I wasn't able to do songs like that anymore but luckily yesterday proved me wrong. Although the writing process echoed times of old, the song is quite unlike any song we've done so far (at least for now when it only exists in my head), even might call it aggressive. Maybe. Anywhooo, the lyrics can be peeped here, it's called "The Silver Haze".
30.09.2002 A couple of steps closer to a finished product, boys and girls. On Friday we re-recorded the drums for "Trains Pass By" and I think it's the best drum sound we've got so far, so there are some signs of progress visible which is always nice. My playing however wasn't that special but once back behind the mixing table on Sunday we got it sorted pretty nicely. Just the basic shit, more or less. Julius also has been doing some detail work during and after the weekend, cleaning up hisses and peaking sounds and whatnot. On Saturday I hurried down to Club25 after a hard day of renovating the upcoming offices of Mokomaki Designs to spin some discs to warm up the audience for the evening's act Design19. They played a fine gig with especially the beginning of the gig stunningly tight and pleasant. The highlight for me and Julius however, was their surprising choice of a cover song - they blasted through our "You Could Be the One" with amps turned to eleven! And with pride I can say that it was a very good cover and probably would feel the same even if it wasn't our song, many others had also liked it apparently. It's a shame it didn't get caught on tape, I wouldn't mind having another listen to it. The evening's dj setlist is here if you're really, really interested.
27.09.2002 The night was cold but we shot some pics anyway. You can see the results right here in the pictures-section. The man behind the camera this time was our trusty vehicle tech Thomas Rönnholm aka the FLB who clearly proved that he's skilled also in contraptions that don't necessarily travel at 100mph. I guess we look a bit drugged up in some shots but there are a couple of nice ones too for tha ladiez. Yep yep. I also got interviewed for some newspaper in Jyväskylä yesterday on account of us playing in the city next month. I'm afraid I was caught off guard a bit by the interview and probably came out really dull and uninteresting. Which I of course am not. Oh the irony of today's entry. So let's close it off with an advertisement; I am spinning records at Club25 tomorrow and Design19 will be playing and you will be there. Full stop.
26.09.2002 We meant to shoot some pictures yesterday but unfortunately the weather turned its back on us and due to the freezing showers we decided to have a go at it later today. I also approached one photographer today about shooting our album cover, we'll see if she's interested. We've already got the basic idea about how we'd want the sleeves to appear, I even made some sketches of them yesterday, but of course the outcome of the pictures will largely set the mood in the end. I had a call from Julius early this morning and he was already working on some mixing and stuff, I really can't see myself doing that stuff at 9 o'clock in the morning. It seems we still have to make our way back to our rehearsal studios to record the drums for "Building Blocks" again since the jitter sound couldn't be erased without affecting the whole sound too drastically. I guess we'll be doing that tomorrow so we'll get it out of the way and will be able to focus on the guitar and the vocals.
24.09.2002 Back in the studio we spent the whole day cutting "Kid With Fiery Eyes"' new drumtracks and a nice job we did at it too. There are a couple of interesting breaks and stuff we made that should liven up the song and maybe bring a smile to someone's face, at least it brought to ours when we were making them. After I had packed it in for the night, Julius had kept on working with the track playing with the demo vocal and drum sounds and I guess he also finished the work on Rhodes tracks. It was a nice session since we worked really hard pretty much non-stop, there was a sense of accomplishment when we had it all sorted out. Oh yeah, and I forgot to include Julius's adventures in rock in yesterday's weekend update; he was asked to play keyboards by the nice chaps of Leopold Delloria at least on their gigs and he spent Sunday evening rehearsing with them. From what I could tell, it had been quite a succesful audition with both parties more than satisfied. It's good that Julius has now a channel to vent out his rawk leanings and we can more easily concentrate on the slow and depressing stuff ourselves, hardyhar.
23.09.2002 Okay, right about now Ilkka should be stomping his size 12's on foreign ground, London, England that is. For those who have no prior knowledge of his moving there, he's gone off now study some music business stuff and should be a fully fledged professional in three years' time. Luckily we are fortunate enough to get to witness his adventures second hand via this journal thingy our friends at mokomaki set up for him. You can reach the journal at the following address: nsam.vaasa.net/ilkka . To recap the weekend a little bit here's a few sentences; On Friday we were supposed to do some studiowork but Julius had caught the flu and we had to cancel the session (and also the other intended sessions for the weekend, unfortunately). Meanwhile I headed down to Club25 and saw Endstand and the Swedish band Nine. Endstand was nice enough but nothing like the mindblowing gig I last had experienced form them some six months ago. But come Nine's time to enter the stage I really was blown away. Their sound was just ruthlessly amazing and they played so damn tight you couldn't have slipped a drop of water through and they made it look so easy, too. The music they played was like rocking death metal hardcore or something, I probably wouldn't listen to it at home but I have to recommend you don't miss 'em if they're at a venue near you. On Saturday me and FLB threw Ilkka in a van and drove him down to Helsinki so we'd make sure he got on the plane. A very funny trip it was (especially when our friend Harri joined us in Helsinki for a bizarre conversation over a cup of java) and so I guess the laughs we shared made it easier to wish Ilkka bon voyage, no tears shed or nothing. Anyway he should be coming home for Christmas and we have some sledding plans already laid out. But to remind you once again, be sure to check out Ilkka's England Journal and drop him a line or two in the guestbook or directly to: ilkka@nsam.vaasa.net
20.09.2002 Took the last chance to play a game of Streetgolf with Ilkka last night in the near below zero conditions. Fingers were frozen and balls were lost in the darkness of the night but a fun game nonetheless. Even though I ended up getting beat really bad in the end. The rookie FLB took home first prize with Ilkka in second place. Despite our recommendations Ilkka said he wasn't going to export this fine sport to the Ol' Blighty but I'm sure in time he'll grow to miss the game enough to try it out there too. And ends up on the cover of some hi-energy sports mag.
19.09.2002 As the hundreds and hundreds of disappointed fans noticed, Julius didn't show up at Club25 yesterday after all. There's a rumour about town that it was due to a condition he'd acquired the night before involving gallons of beverages and a cup of salted nuts. Sorry 'bout that, folks.
18.09.2002 Just a word of advice to you people scavenging in the Vaasa nightlife tonight, Julius is playing some freestyle keyboard stuff (that's improvisation for you older folks out there) with Design19's Eerikki at Club25 so you better check that shit out.
17.09.2002 Headed down to our rehearsal studios to re-record some drums and Rhodes tracks yesterday. We did new drum takes for "Building Blocks" and some added shit for "Kid With Fiery Eyes". Rhodes tracks were for "Kid" and "Trains Pass By", the sound we got was super-nice. This was the first time we used the new mixing table for recording and it proved to be very handy indeed. I think we've got the needed drumtracks done for the record although I was a bit uneasy about the jitter sound we have on "Trains"', there's a slight chance that we have to redo it if Julius doesn't find some trick to erase it. Next on the menu is recording heaps of guitar, then vocals and then a massive mixing/finalizing task. So quite a lot of work still but I hope we'll get the record ready for the Christmas market.
16.09.2002 A peculiar rehearsal of Friday, we had some extras in there and I guess everyone was in weekend spirits. We did some songs with our new unnamed project plus with Graceskull featuring FLB on bass after which we turned into a jamming machine belting out a 20 minute blues jam and some extreme metal stuff. Featured vocals were provided by Firevision's Mikko, he had this cool track they'd been playing with when they'd been recording their album called "Osiris is rising from his grave" which we rocked away most beautifully. Also worth a mention was Julius and FLB's organ/guitar duel during the blues jam, that was some hot shit right there. Yup, yup. On Saturday we checked out Maj Karman Kauniit Kuvat live on stage at Amarillo and I'm afraid to tell you that unlike many a time before, they kinda sorta sucked. I guess that's a pretty harsh way to put it but even their drummer who has really shown some kick ass skills on numerous occasions I've caught them before didn't impress me. It might've had something to do with the messy sound, it might've not. On Sunday we did some minor work with Julius, mostly just listening to the songs and figuring out what was still needed in which song, etc. We did also record one keyboard thingy on "The Kid With Fiery Eyes" with Julius' new baby. After this lazy session we proceeded on to DOM bar which acted as the set for Ilkka's "Going to London" party. Some damn fine music was played throughout the evening (mucho respekk for Janna, Hiku and Kaisa) by all female DJ line-up and an interesting Ilkka-by-numbers-quiz saw the man giving away a very small percentage of his enormous collection of mugs and cups to anyone who could guess his phonenumber and the likes. Lots of nice people and a very fun time indeed but for the first time it made me realize that Ilkka really is going away. But as I remember sometime having said, as sucky as it is to us here seeing him go, it's a great opportunity for him to pursue his ambitions so all power to him. Okay, enough with this teary-eyed crap; I need a saga, what's the saga, it's Songs for the Deaf, you can't even hear it...
13.09.2002 The Rock Inn event we're playing at next month have got their webpages up now and they had a pretty interesting profile of us in there, peep it here. Talking of websites, this here little page of ours reached the 10000 visitor mark yesterday, so a hefty thanks to all who keep on coming back.
12.09.2002 Having spent a good while inside my own head during the last couple of days due to some travelling, I have acquired some fresh ideas for mainly lyrics but also songs in general. While this may not sound all that revolutionary, it has been quite refreshing for me since I haven't had this type of period for a long while. Along with the solitude I guess the feel of Autumn in the air and reading the Nick Drake biography (while listening to his albums, au naturelle) might have had something to do with the slight change of mindstate for the more comtemplative. I just hope I can bring all these ideas out accordingly, hope I would have more time to work with them. I guess I'm beginning to sound like an art fag at this point, so I better stop so as not to shatter your image of me as an extravagant rock'n'roll animal. Yes, the last remark was something we like to call humor. On other news, we got the new mixing desk ready for action now so I hope we could rehearse during the weekend and test it out. We haven't done any rehearsing either in a while so I think we might benefit from it also in other ways than just getting to know the new equipment.
09.09.2002 It's time for a weekend update once again, children. On Friday we rehearsed a bit with our new still unnamed band, got some more sense into the two songs we have thus far, at least in the arrangements. On Saturday we were supposed to have a deejaying gig at Club25 but due to some technical difficulties on the club's part it was scrapped and instead we just caught the Damn Seagulls on stage. They were quite good live but once having popped their CD that Coma bought into the car stereo their wobbly Finglish kinda spoiled it all. So catch them live with a bad PA if you can. On Sunday I once again spent most of the day just lying on the sofa and writing bits and pieces of songs which may or may not be used in the near future. There was at least one particular slow tune that might end up somewhere.
06.09.2002 Paati called me up yesterday at around noon and wanted to form a new band. I had no idea how serious he or anyone concerned was about this but of course said yes. So at the end of the day we'd had our first rehearsals and had two songs just about ready (without lyrics). It seems that I'm playing bass and singing with Paati on the drums as usual and on guitars we have the infamous Graceskull/Sugarrush drivetech FLB and a guy called Miika. Considering the two axemen hadn't played with a band in years, they truly deserve props since we kinda sounded like a real band straight away. I thought (and after listening to the QOTSA album about 100 times this week, also hoped) that we would play this harder type of rock but the two songs we ended up with were pretty poppy, even Sugarrush-ish. Two quite satisfactory songs in an evening ain't bad so we'll just see what happens with this project.
05.09.2002 Back in the real studio instead of my living room, we did some hardcore mixing on "Trains Pass By" and "Morning Came". Actually on "Morning came" we just checked out the structure and stuff, Julius had found a wonderful twangy 50's sound for the guitar on that one that I think we're going to use. Mainly the evening was spent on getting the 50 or so drum and percussion tracks on "Trains" in order and at the end of the day we were really pleased with the outcome (and had scraped a whole heap of crap takes and bits). So now it has normal drums plus two or three takes played with brushes so it's quite an interesting sound. Now the song needs just vocals and a couple of guitar tracks and it's all done. I had my worries (like I have had for a couple of other songs too, namely "Push" and "Building Blocks") that we can't quite produce the song in the studio like it should be, capture the right feeling or something so I'm really glad my worries have been totally unnecessary. On a lower note, our gig in Fontana at the end of this month has been cancelled. I don't really know what the reason behind pulling the plug was but I suspect it has something to do with the "no-decent-music" policy they enforce there. Oh well, let's end today's entry with some good news, me and Paati are deejaying at Club25 this Saturday, providing the correct atmosphere for the evening's band Damn Seagulls. Rock'n'roll, hit tunes, Saturday; got it?
04.09.2002 More demoing yesterday, I finished the no-name song which now goes with the title "Natural" (lyrics are also uploaded into lyrics section) and "Stifle" too, so I was quite prolific. While I was readying myself to pack it in for the night and collapse on the bed I had a sudden surge of inspiration which meant I recorded a snippet of a new song and some backing vocals for "Stifle" butt-naked in the middle of the night. A heat of the moment kind of thing, you know. Anyway, at least there and then the idea of the gospel-ish harmonies on "Stifle" felt great to me and now having listened to it with new set of ears, it doesn't sound bad at all. In fact I kind of consider it one of the best naked moments of my life (and like many of the other great unclothed moments, this too was a strictly solo performance, hurhur). Maybe it's just best you judge it yourself, so to listen to me singing naked click here. Another piece of earcandy you might be interested in can be found over at Skithund Records' site where they have posted the Atyd remix of our "Beautifullest Lie".
03.09.2002 I got tired of doing fuck-all and got the old microphone out of the drawer to record some demos yesterday. Actually I just managed to finish one - "Sparrow" - and do a couple of guitar takes on another track that has no name as of yet because I had to stop recording to catch the final episode of Temptation Island on TV. I guess I'll be doing some more shit today, at least finish that no-name one. Julius meanwhile had found some change in his pocket and bought a new vintage keyboard that had some cool as icetea sounds and it looked fantastic (which, once again, is of course the number one reason to buy any instrument). The zaniest sounds, however, came out of it due to a malfunctioning octave button, pressing it correctly made it sound like loading a game on Commodore 64. Can't wait to use it in action.
02.09.2002 While making music was again pretty much on hold this last weekend, we managed to listen to quite a lot of it. Mainly my (and Sugarrush's Coma's) ears were fixed on the new albums from Queens of the Stone Age and the Ark. They're both really great and really uplifting (a quality which proved to be quite essential due to the weekend's unreported un-musical happenings) and provide plenty of reasons to play air-drums and sing along. But the most moving piece - or in this case pieces - of music this weekend was courtesy of the Flaming Lips. We set up four CD-players in my flat on Saturday night in which we inserted the four CD's included in Lips' Zaireeka album. Then we proceeded to play them hitting play on each player simultaneously and tried to listen to all the strangeness coming at us from every direction. It was quite spectacular and amazing. The only thing that bothered me was that the players (especially one of them) didn't play the songs in exact the same speed so even if we managed to sync the start of the songs just right, there was something not-so-sync'ed happening towards the end of the song. On some songs that didn't even matter since it was just a kind of delay effect. Anyway, a great experience to which also added the fireworks in the night sky outside my window (in Vaasa we celebrate this thing called huvilakauden päättäjäiset on the last Saturday of September each year). Another cool experience was playing with Firevision boys' brand spanking new Roland electric drumset on Sunday. We were like little children playing on this thing and its 1000 sounds ranging from very realistic drum sounds to some odd backwards growling. The reason they've gotten this wonderful contraption is that they've gotten themselves a new drumperson for gigs, I guess he was called Janne or something and he also plays drums for the Helsinki band the Duplo. A nice guy he was, too, it takes some patience to watch us raving over his instrument, he wasn't even laughing, just smiling politely. Today we ordered the mixing table for rehearsal studio purposes (and whatever), it's a Behringer if I remember correctly. I wish we'd also get new speakers, it'd really do good for the sound in the studio but unfortunately these things never come free.
29.08.2002 I've been fiddling about with a couple of new bits and pieces of music and lyrics. I guess now that the weather's taken a turn for the worse, my stuff is going in the more melancholy direction like I speculated it would. Which is nice. Probably. Meanwhile we've also considered buying some new equipment, at least a mixer to our rehearsing studios, in the next few days I guess we'll get on down to ordering the stuff.
26.08.2002 Not much musical activity this weekend. Me and the FLB spent better part of the weekend as spectators in Finnish skateboarding championships in Helsinki. However the main event of the weekend was seeing the David Lynch masterpiece of "Mulholland Drive" at the cinema. It truly is a must-see (although as a Lynch fanatic I might be somewhat biased) - scary, sexy, funny and puzzling all rolled into one. I also managed to purchase a copy of Flaming Lips' oddball experimental four CD simultaneous play album "Zaireeka" which we'll hopefully be listening to sometime this week, can't wait to try it out. For more info on this extraordinary album, flip on over to flaminglips.com's discography section. Come Sunday night, we were back in Vaasa and Ilkka was playing 80's tunes in DOM bar downtown. It seemed to be quite a good party with people dressed up accordingly dancing along to Sigue Sigue Sputnik and the likes and 80's somewhat repulsive erotica splashed on the TV-screen. Oh yeah, and Julius' piano tuning man hadn't showed up which - as far I recall - isn't the first time this has happened.
23.08.2002 Writing some lyrics yesterday. Reading them now makes me kind of worried since they seem to be all clichéd up from start to finish. I guess there's nothing wrong with a little cliché here and there but I feel that most my lyrics in recent times have come out kinda bland or something. Maybe things have been running so smoothly for me that I have nothing to bleed my heart about, it's just sunshine / pie-in-the-sky / oh-i'm-so-happy typa shit over and over again. But I guess since it's the way I'm feeling right now, I gotta let it out and just wait for the murky September nights to bring the darker colors onto the palette. Yeah right. Julius got his piano tuned yesterday but I'm yet to hear from him how it went. Expensive fuckers, mind you, those tune-up guys. Maybe I'll write an angry song about them to get some change into the process, hardy-fucking-har.
20.08.2002 Just some minor recording yesterday, Julle laid down a couple of tracks of Rhodes on "Trains Pass By" and "Building Blocks". As we got down to the studio, Andy J. was there recording a demo of a Monkey Monday song so I guess something is happening with this sideproject of Paati's. And in the saga of "People and their cameras" we present yet another three chapters, yet again presenting shots from Taiteiden yö, this time by Jocka Träskbäck. The three pictures can be found here, here and here.
19.08.2002 A beautiful morning with some muy excellent news: Jocke the guitar man got married on Saturday! So our biggest, grandest greetings to both the man and the wife! While wedding waltzes were waltzed away me and Paati were thrown behind the decks at SkyBar on DJ duties and while it may not amount to much compared to getting hitched, we had fun playing great records all night, check out the setlist right here.
16.08.2002 Just a brief little announcement that we're playing records with Paati tomorrow night in SkyBar in Vaasa, so check on by for some great tunes. I played around with the aforementioned ill-fated new song and realised that with a different arrangement it might get its chance at being a Graceskull tune instead of a Place-2-Go cover. If not that then I'll be at least adapting some of its parts into other songs, the bridge especially I like. But we'll see what happens.
15.08.2002 Down in the studio again yesterday recording drumtracks for "Trains Pass By" and organ bits to "Trains", "Building Blocks" and "Morning Came". Julius set up an interesting location for one of the mics, namely in the echoing hall outside the studio which proved to provide great sound that was most put to use when I decided that also "Morning Came" needed some drums. So I just played the track through with this sloppy Pavement-ish style and it was all there, first take. Some pretty odd recording and percussive solutions were adapted also to "Trains" where you might hear for example Julius clacking away on his clogs and other stupid stuff if we decide to include them in the final mix. We also made an attempt at recording the brand new tune I have been working with but decided to scrap it since we realised it started to sound very much like a re-make of one Place-2-Go song, especially after we got the drumtracks in there. Oh well, these accidents do happen sometimes in popular music, I'm just glad we realised it this early before we played it to Jocke who would've probably laughed our asses off the face of the earth if we'd presented him a song he himself had made as "our great new song".
14.08.2002 Been fiddling all day with this new tune, trying to get the lyrics going but both verses I've done seem somehow forced or something, I need to re-write them. The chorus and bridge I can live with but the verses don't say much even on my not-that-extraordinary standards. The tune itself is quite poppy and upbeat.
13.08.2002 After having broken into the trunk of my car with a screwdriver yesterday, we packed some gear to go and headed down to our rehearsal studio to record some drumtracks. We got a nice enough rendition of "Building Blocks" at least and a there-there "Splinter". "Splinter"'s drums need some heavy cutting up before they're release-worthy, the beat for the verse is quite difficult for a non-drummer like me to play. I was totally exhausted after a whole night of battering and for the first time in years fell asleep before midnite. Tonight we intend to return to record drums for "Trains Pass By" at least, let's see what else we can come up with.
12.08.2002 Well, it was fun at least. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure I do say that a lot around here but it really was fun playing a set on Kent-covers although I still regret some mistakes that occurred (mostly for my part, like on "Socker" and "Kärleken väntar" I started singing them one octave higher than I intended to and thus ran out of high notes a few times somewhere inbetween). But especially after having lost the nervy edge I guess we all had in the beginning of the gig, it all started to fall in place and we concentrated more on having fun and not on playing the songs by numbers. Apparently it caught on with the audience because after our encore that ended with each band member getting off the stage with a signature drum solo, they wanted even more. So we proceeded with even more solo drumming and a final jam of "Livräddaren". And a giant heap of laughter backstage. Talking of heaps, there's a ton of pictures from the gig (and a couple of videoclips to boot) over here once again courtesy of Mr. Toni Viemerö.
09.08.2002 Apparently the gig went down well judging by the feedback I got after the gig from many a person. I myself was a bit out of it for the most part of the gig because - as strange as it may sound - I'm not used to playing Graceskull gigs standing up, this was the first for me without a stool. It made playing the guitar and especially singing a bit more difficult for some reason but as the earlier mentioned praises proved, it really couldn't be that bad. We had the nicest stage set with a picket fence and sunflowers splitting it in half and night-sky like lights twinkling in the background. I guess you could call it homely, we liked the lights so much that we're probably going to use them also tonight when we play Kent-covers with the Sugarrush in the very same Amarillo. I think you can get some idea looking at the fresh-from-the-oven pics by Toni Viemerö from the gig over here. We might also have some videoclips for you next week since FLB videotaped the gig - unless it proves to document us looking embarrassing or something. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, the setlist should also be in its right place right about now, I think we did pretty well with all three songs that we hadn't played live before.
08.08.2002 Wrote down some lyrics for one of the new songs yesterday and here are the results. The ditty is called "Stifle" - at least for now it is. Remember to get your ass over to Amarillo tonight, the reasons are aplenty; we're playing (stagetime at midnite), it's free entry and it's going to be wonderful.
07.08.2002 Final rehearsals before the gig yesterday. Some of the stuff went just dandy but some of it was a bit off and sloppy. Partially I have to blame this on Paati who was up to his simian tricks again, starting from the fact that he had covered his bass drum with a pair of sweaty'n'stinking trunks. Ugh. Best working song in my opinion was "Outside" for which the Rock Monkey used his better side of the brain and made up a Supersonic-ish drum intro which was nice. Now we'll just have to cross our fingers and hope that everything will go smoothly on Thursday and Friday. See ya then.
05.08.2002 Not much to report really, the weekend was pretty much spent working, watching 80's skatevideos and celebrating FLB's birthday - on my behalf, at least - apart from Friday night's Kent-rehearsal. I think I was dead awful and since that was the final rehearsal we are able to have before the real gig I'm not feeling especially confident at the moment. Oh well, I have a couple of days on my hands to get my shit straight.
02.08.2002 Rehearsals yesterday. We decided on our setlist and it felt pretty good. Surprisingly of all the songs "Beautifullest Lie" seemed to work best, I guess mainly due to Jocke's fine slide-solo and Andy's bass fills during that solo. I think we'll have one more rehearsal before the gig, just to be on the safe side of things.
01.08.2002 So I found 5 minutes somewhere yesterday to write some lyrics to one of the new songs. I think I got it about half finished or so, it might be called "Sparrow". We also had our final Tennis Club of the summer and celebrated this occasion with playing some super-great tunes, maybe ever greater than usual. Unfortunately we didn't list them due some unprecedented laziness. News on the merchandise front too as we finally got a new shipment of T-shirts on our hands and the real news is that now we also carry women's sizes from XS to M (they're femininely fitted, too). So get your orders in, ladies. Gents, too.
31.07.2002 A new gig to announce - well, not new but I just got reminded we had it booked in the first place - in Vaasa's Fontana on September 25th. I think we're going to work harder for gigs outside our hometown so that peeps won't get tired of our sorry faces in here. I also worked on a song yesterday which sounds to me like some Christmas ditty. Don't have a title or lyrics for it yet, I wish I'd have more time on my hands again so I could write down some lyrics because I have at least three songs in the pipeline that are without words.
30.07.2002 Some graphic work yesterday, got posters for both Amarillo gigs done. Here's the one for Taiteiden yö and this one is for the Kent-covers night.
29.07.2002 Friday's "Rock My Heavy" went just fine'n'dandy, we played the best of records backdropped with '88 WWF Survivor Series with Andre the Giant, Jake the Snake Roberts and all them yesteryear's wrestling greats exploded on the big screen. The crowd seemed to enjoy it and so did we. On Saturday we rehearsed with Graceskull for the first time in a long while and it was quite a strange rehearsal. Everyone seemed to be really uptight; Ilkka basically threw his guitar in the corner after the mic on it wasn't functioning, Andy was in a hurry to catch "Napakymppi" on the telly and - being the sophisticated cultural persona he is - Jocke was running late due to catching a play at the theater. So we practised without the other guitar first and then without bass. In the end it worked out pretty good, Jocke really played some damn fine stuff on there. So now we have some idea of which songs we might be playing on our next gig in Taiteiden Yö. On Sunday we tried to get our stage map and some props for the gig in check and I think we have also that aspect pretty well worked out now. Come evening, me and Julius got our asses in the studio again and tried out them new microphones with recording some acoustic guitars, piano and demo vocals for "Push". The song sounds really good now, there's just some major mixing to be done before it's all in place. It also needs some new electric guitar and maybe some theremin-like sounds, we'll see.
26.07.2002 Another night of Streetgolfing yesterday. The results were nothing out of the ordinary, Team Graceskull holding on tight to the last two positions. Even though my playing never is something to go tell the kids about, yesterday it was even worse. I managed to hit about 50 or so shots trying to get up these two staircases which others cleared with just a couple of swings. It must've been the damp weather that affected my game like that. Sure. Spirits are lifted tonight however when we're having our Rock My Heavy -night at Papin Nenä here in Vaasa. We're once again spinning some hard hitting heavy metal records with air-guitars a-swingin' so come on by!
24.07.2002 Quite a busy day yesterday. First I sketched our upcoming gig's poster (hoping I'll get it done today or tomorrow) then headed over to Julius's place to do some minor guitar modification. Julius had finally gotten those microphones and the compressor-thingy he had ordered and we did some testing with them before we had to be off for a Kent-rehearsal. I have to say that not only did the new gear look fucking good but sound too, especially when we tested them with acoustic guitar they made quite a difference. Can't wait to try 'em out in action. But back to the timeline, the Kent-project rehearsals went just dandy. We had one of the new mics with us which I sang into and it too made a significant difference since we've had problem hearing my vocals from under all that noise that the other boys make but now it was mucho better. There are still a couple of songs that I'm not that self confident with, I have my trouble finding my vocal range's highest and lowest keys. But a good thing is that yesterday I seemed to find those keys easier than I have done before, it just took some extreme screaming, especially for the high notes to come out. The rehearsal was a lot of fun also in other ways than just playing, we made some hilarious choreography planning and other antics among the musical and physical sweatting.
22.07.2002 Ho hum, it's been awhile. The absence of updates on "news" front is heavily due to my taking time off the routine shit I tend to do, some could even call it being on vacation. Now, however, we're back with scars to prove. A lot has happened since the last update even if I was on vacation, mainly rehearsals with our Kent-covers project and some serious streetgolfing. I think we've managed to get the Kent thingy into pretty satisfactory state, I still have some troubles getting the high notes and not really remembering the lyrics but we still have a few weeks before showtime so there still is hope. Streetgolfing, for Team Graceskull's part, has been going as usual - getting our asses kicked by the skilled young stallions of Team Sugarrush. Oh well, at least I'm third in the current leaderboard standings so I don't have to cry myself to sleep at night just yet. There's also the fact that I stand pretty high in the standings of our new game - a game we invented one sunny afternoon last week involving a superball and a rock leading into the sea - that eases my mind. In between sports and playing covers we've also managed to do some deejaying, first in DOM bar and then at our usual slot in Papin Nenä's Tennis Club last Wednesday. It's a shame that we didn't list the songs for Tennis Club cause there were some interesting mixes and great songs played that night. But luckily some extraordinary songs made it onto DOM's playlist which we have stored for y'all right here. As for the recording part, I'm sorry to inform you that we've had some bad luck with the equipment which has kept us out of the studio and on our asses waiting for some parts to arrive from this and that corner of the world. Julius also has made some orders for brand new microphones and other tech shit which looked pretty professional to me at least but what do I know. I think they should be arriving this week and we're also hoping to get the recording equipment's missing parts in place pretty soon. And finally as the more observant of you have already noticed, we have some new gigs to declare. First off we're kicking a midnite set (or something like that) in Taiteiden Yö in Vaasa on 8th August with our Kent-covers extravaganza the next day in the very same Amarillo location. Aside from these hometown shows we're also booked for Rock Inn festival in Jyväskylä which takes place 17-18th October which is nice because it's a new place for us. I guess that about wraps it up, now rest your sleepy eyes.
09.07.2002 So I got sick and spent better part of last week lying fevered up in bed. However on Friday I got my ass moving since I had a deejaying gig at Design19's record release party. The release of their record, Trigger, was tied to Graceskull also in the sense that our very own Julius has also one song he wrote and produced on the album. As if this wasn't enough also Ilkka made his contribution to the evening as he got on stage to blast through a couple of blues tunes with Design19's Eeka under the moniker Ohio Total. It was a damn fun party which we closed off with air drumming some Refused hits with the boys from Circum. On Saturday I got on stage with the Sugarrush for Rockperry festival which was a nice gig although the early stagetime wasn't all that inspiring. But the arranging personnel made it all worthwhile with some nice catering and beverages all nite long. On Sunday we drove down to Turku with Julius also onboard as the sound specialist. We played the gig in the ultra hot'n'sweaty Dynamo and it was hella fun. The place was packed and they seemed to enjoy it as much as we did. After the gig it seemed that Paati had made such a good sound with the drums that Kent's bass and guitar players were eager to try them themselves. Nice try but no match to Rock-Apina, boys. The after party at Nicke's was filled with some great records and monkey-taming, thanks to him for putting up with us till the extremely wee hours of the morning.
02.07.2002 Still neck deep in hard work. Sunday saw us once again recording loads of parts to different songs. We got some vocals finished for "Night falls" and "Surrender" and some guitar too. We also got some basic guideline guitar and stuff recorded to "Morning came" and "Trains pass by". Ilkka dropped by later in evening with a CD in his back pocket containing E-12's remixes of "Silence makes us strong". We had a listen to them a couple of times and decided that we're gong to slap the dub remix with the deep, deep bass on the record. On Monday we just cleaned up tracks, got rid if hissing on some takes and such stuff - a task that had already kept Julius up very late on Sunday. We also got some bass and guitar takes on tape. Oh yeah, I mustn't forget to mention the grandfather clock we recorded on "Building blocks", it was just great, the out of rhythm tic-tacing and all. Tuesday will be a bit of break from recording which is fine by me cause I thi
30.06.2002 Another long day in the studio. A bit more well rounded session as vocals, percussions, organs and other keyboards were recorded instead of just heaps of the good ole guitar. Okay, there were a few guitar tracks done too. One of the highlights of the day was the Hammond sound we got on "Dark don't care", it's just one note through the whole four and the some minutes of the song and sounds just fantabulous. Under work were also the following list of tunes: "Last of the secrets", "Make way", "Push" and "Splinter" (when working on this tune the day's length really began to show, Julius was all over the song with his rocking blueeez solos - maybe it's just a new direction for Graceskull that emerged...)
29.06.2002 Quite a good start to the recording process yesterday as we worked for something like nine hours straight, we finished at around two in the morning. Mostly loads and loads of guitars were caught on tape with some drums and vocals sprinkled here and there also. We borrowed this beautiful Fender Mustang from the legendary Tapani Orja aka FLB which proved to produce some damn fine sounds - both clean and ultra distorted. Songs worked on included at least "Dark don't care", "Make way", "Last of the secrets" and "Building blocks". Except for the hundred takes I did on "Dark don't care" everything went very smoothly indeed so my insecurities proved to be unnecessary once again.
28.06.2002 Continued on the demos yesterday. I got the silly slide bits done for "Little Diva" and recorded "All I Need" in its entirety. I still have "Everyday" to demo and then we have some sort of versions in existance of all the newer songs I've written. These versions feature mucho crap playing and singing so I don't know if I dare to pile 'em up here but then again, who gives a shit - they're just demos. Today we've scheduled to start recording like we fucking mean it, we've cleared our calendars of all unnecessary action and hopefully at the end of the next few weeks we're way closer to finishing the album. Somehow getting back to studio scares me because it's been such a long time since real studiowork has been done and we have to start from scratch with a number of songs but more than scared I'm eager to get things done. Since we managed to agree on the songs we're going to work with, Julius and me, I'm confident that the album's going to be fucking good since no half-decent song made the cut. It's just up to us now to get the songs to sound their best no matter how long it takes - so I ain't giving release dates at this point yet. But luckily there's been some movement on our other album project which is the remix thingy. At least Mikael Mikkonen and E-12 have been finishing their shit recently and Vapaapudotus's Myyrä apparently is needing just some vocal tracks to get his mix ready. We just have to shake a couple of lazy remixers now and then we can set a release date for the disc, I'm hoping it will be out in already this summer. But no promises, you know how these things go...
27.06.2002 A bit more to report today then. Though yesterday was mostly done planning and scheming we did some preliminary programming for "Splinter" and I recorded two demos - "Dark Don't Care" and "Little Diva" - at home. "Diva" is still missing some hee-haw slide guitar or something. I managed to get myself all stressed up while discussing how the album should turn out, which tracks should be on it and which definitely shouldn't, I even started to sketch out a tracklist for the LP but the only track I'm 100% sure of is the closing track. Once I got home and listened to "Dark Don't Care" one more time I began to feel 100% about the opening track too, we'd just need a rockier upbeat tune as the follower to that one and after that it should be all downhill. Right about now, I have no idea whether we have that kind of a song in our back pocket or do I have to write a rocker especially for that damn purpose.
26.06.2002 Just some minor writing stuff to report, brother and sisters. I have no recollections of how the song went but I think it was quite upbeat. Julius had also done some brainwork and sketched out plans for songs, productionwise.
25.06.2002 I had myself a couple hours off the rat-race yesterday and quite prolifically managed to finish two tunes. They're both basically chorusless, I have no idea how that happened but decent enough anyway. The first one was a tune I had been working on before, I had the melody ready so I just wrote the lyrics down. The other one was all written in ten minutes or so, it had a midnite vibe to it so the lyrics came out that way too. Quite cheesy and clichéd but I'd rather have that than just write some intellectual bullshit that doesn't go with the music at all. The lyrics for this pair - "Everyday" and "Dark Don't Care" - can be now found from the lyrics section.
24.06.2002 Although I could amuse you with some peculiar stories of getting caught in a tiny elevator with six other people, finding my father in Vaasa's archipelago and briefly visiting an SMS-chat show in the telly, I'll just run through the Midsummer's musical happenings briefly. It had been a while but on Thursday we rehearsed once again with Mr. Kulju on the electric guitar and Andy J. on bass. We ran through quite a heap of songs with "Building blocks" and "Surrender" standing out as the nicest renditions. Some songs were definitely better with that electric guitar hammering away but I felt that there were also moments that there was too much distoriton or whatevs. Well, you can't expect it all to work out right away of course. We discussed this matter (and a great deal of others too) with Jocke on Saturday and came to some conclusions. Maybe. Anyway it's damn good to have a guitar player that is such a good musician that he is able to play anything and isn't bound by technical limitations like myself. On Sunday the Sugarrush played their annual Midsummer acoustic set at Sky-Bar which me and Julius checked out (Ilkka had mysteriously dissappeared by this point). It was a fun set once again closed off with soon to be classic "Jee-jee-jeesus". It's nice to catch them live once in a while without self having to sweat on the same stage.
20.06.2002 Another fine Tennis Club last night. This particular night gained its status of nice because - probably because of the near looming Midsummer's festivities - there was such a small number of people attending the club that we could play whatever the heck we liked so the setlist grew as interesting as it was great. Unfortunately Andy J. forgot the written down list'o'songs at the club so you'll have to wait a couple of days before gazing upon this fine list. Meanwhile, have a great Midsummer and stay safe.
17.06.2002 So, it was Provinssirock 2002 this last weekend which can be very well noticed from the bags under my eyes. The ratio between sleep and laughter was once again streched pretty interestingly with about a thousand new stupid catchphrases now occupying my headspace. The festival program's defite highlight was the Ark's gig, they just blew me away. The guys looked great, sounded great, had great songs and the whole attitude seemed to be so much in check that I have nothing negative to say about their show. To take recent guestbook entries' implications even further I have to say that the gay-ness of the gig was probably the main thing that made it so good, it was just so over the top that you couldn't help but love it. Another great (but maybe a couple of songs too long, for my old'n'tired ears at least) set was provided by metal gods Slayer who played all the right songs with the right take-no-prisoners attitude. They had walls of Marshalls stacked behind their backs, Mr. Hannemann had black hockey pads on and black leather was the only way to go pantwise, all in true metal style. Other good acts witnessed were Hellacopters, Motorhomes, Sara and Sweatmaster who we checked out at the after club on Friday (what a fucking drummer!). The absolute funniest moments of the weekend were however spent on the location of Varjoprovinssi. We've now stayed over at Sami Rumpunen's place for a couple of Provinssirocks worth and since the vast majority of the people there are involved with one band or the other, this year he had an idea that the guests would throw a set on the house's yard, thus the name. This proved to be a great idea, first thing Saturday morning we threw in a couple of songs with Graceskull, then a couple of songs with the Sugarrush (with me filling in for Andy J. who arrived later on Saturday) and after the main festival's festivities it was time for the Korhonen Brothers Experience (brothers Jorma and Paulus respectively from Sara and Velvetcut). The night went on with tons of songs sung together with all the above and some guests to boot and finally ended at about 7 in the morning with a bare bottom slapping version of the Sugarrush's future hit "Jee-jee-jeesus". Just wonderful, big luv out to everyone who stayed up with us. I probably managed to stay up for something like two seconds once I got home on Sunday only to wake up briefly a couple of hours after falling asleep to sketch a new song out and fall back to sleep again. To close this entry off, I announce that now having played our version of Sara's "KSK" to their singer Jorma in the middle of a beautiful summer night, I can unleash it on yo asses so the demo version is available in the audio section, go check it out.
13.06.2002 It has once again been a busy week so not much music related has happened if you count my extravagant Wilco-listening out of the equation. One newsworthy item however was Tuesday night's brief session between myself and Rock-Monkey. He'd had a revelation and rushed over to my place to get the song on tape. We polished it with some minor adjustments and harmonies and in the end of the 15 minute session we had ourselves a damn fine song. You just have to wait for Monkey Monday's debut to hear it, coming your way in the year 2013. Maybe.
11.06.2002 So some rehearsing yesterday. Basically we just fooled around and played some songs once or twice and kind of decided which ones we're going to play this Saturday. I think we are going to have some trouble with getting my voice heard since there'll probably be no PA-system but if everyone just hushes their playing, I think we just might pll it through. I wish I was more of the Tom Jones type instead of the Nina Persson mould.
10.06.2002 It seems such a long time since my last "confession". Well despite the gigantic five days' absence the only newsworthy subject is that our Tennis Club premiere went just dandy. The evening's surpise element was Andy J.'s mixing skills, he learned to operate the decks in a matter of seconds and showcased some smooth mixes all evening. Besides the deejaying I've just been fiddling with new tunes and old ones too, on my own unfortunately since Julius spent the whole weekend in a stylish safari flavored suit in Southern Finland where he attended some wedding. Not his own, ladies, so hold the panic. The oddest new tune fiddling came about in Amarillo restaurant's backstage area around 2 in the morning on Saturday when me and Paati started playing the piano they had there on top of some crap songs the DJ was playing. I have no recollections of how the songs went or if they were any good but at least the Rock-Monkey was hella excited as he oft tends to be. Tonight we're scheduled to return to the rehearsal studios to get our set for Saturday's Varjoprovinssi sorted.
05.06.2002 So here's a few words on our new project I promised last week. We are now involved with Tennis Club which is a club held at Papin Nenä in Vaasa every two weeks this summer. What's it about? Well, frankly I'm not 100% sure just yet but at least the music will be the normal high standard only Graceskull DJ's can provide. Also some cameos by the Sugarrush and our usual associates will be seen. Softball tennis will apparently be played indoors in the restaurant so that's something new. Sounds stupid? Well what else could you expect from a club masterminded by our retard troops...Peep the flyer and come on by, the premier of Tennis Club is tonight.
04.06.2002 I managed to get my hands on my guitar for a couple of minutes yesterday which meant a new song emerging. It is one of them faster tunes. I hope to find a more suiting chorus for it though, you should never have your verses better than choruses, you know. I even sketched out some lyrics so I'm hoping to find some time soon to finish the song.
03.06.2002 Plenty of rock-action this last weekend. First off Friday saw me rehearsing with the Sugarrush which streched pretty late in the evening. So late in fact that evening's next intended activity, Streetgolf, didn't get underway until 3AM in the morning. This time things went a bit more smoothly for the Graceskull team as I got second place with only Paati beating me with a couple of swings. That does sound a bit more violent than I meant it to sound. On Saturday it was time to get our asses on to Vaasa's Hietasaari's stage where they held the near annual Hietasaarirock. First off it was Sugarrush's turn and a bit later on I rocked through Firevision's "Lover" remix. The Sugarrush gig was nice, I had borrowed this beautiful Fender guitar from our tech/roadie/vehicleman/YO-merkonomi FLB (currently also known as Tapani Orja) and the weather was splendid and it was far tighter gig than what we're used to. For the Firevision thingie I was nervous as hell, I was so sure I'd fuck it up and look like a complete fool moving about without my guitar. But however strange it felt for me coming off the stage, everyone told me it had both looked and sounded good. So all in all, a perfect evening for me. After the festival had ended we hucked our asses back to the city and Amarillo restaurant to be more precise where Salaseura threw a fun-filled gig. Extra fun for us at least cause at some point they started replacing all names and references to people to "Ove" and "Ritola" so my name got mentioned a couple of dozen times and according to their rhymes among my accomplishments was copulating with yo mama and being Finnish metal's leading figurehead. Now that's some fuckin' props right there, hurhur. So big thanks to Salaseura boys and also everyone in Hietsku, good times, good times! Meanwhile Julius has been busy in the acquisitions department, early this morning he headed down to Vaasa's music store numero uno, Unisound, and bought himself a brand new organ. "New" meaning of course old like the blue skies, this ugly red thing seemed like it had been handmade by some organfreak in the 70's or maybe even earlier. Apparently the sound is terrible but the looks of this contraption are most impressive. Can't wait to hear it in action.
31.05.2002 Got the lyrics done as planned. The song's called "All I need" and the lyrics reside in the lyrics-section as usual. I'm not 100% sure about all the stuff in there but I hardly ever am. Maybe I'll try fixing them later on but then again I probably won't bother.
30.05.2002 A bit peculiar gig for me yesterday, I played "Not That Fast" in a party that was arranged to celebrate the retirement of two people at the place I work at. I was quite nervous because of the daylight and the fact that everyone was so close and I was all on my own. It went kinda decent I guess, had a bit of a wobbly voice here and there because warming up wasn't a part of the schedule unfortunately. But I guess in the end this kind of strange new experiences are beneficial, you kind of strecth your limits and it can't be that bad. But that said I still think I'm more happy playing in a rock-club. On my way back home from the countryside (the party was held some 10-15 miles from Vaasa) driving in Julius' car I had borrowed to get there I had to sing some more songs by myself since the stereo was busted. The good vibes of this fine vintage vehicle resulted in a new tune on the sunny highway which I then finished at home. I'm just lacking lyrics for it now, I hope I have the time to write them while this nice weather still lasts so I can catch the summery feeling 100%. I felt a sudden disturbance in the Force, like I had written something damn corny in the last few sentences, I'm sorry.
29.05.2002 Back in Vaasa. Or at least I am, Ilkka took the first plane to London yesterday where he'll be checking out his future school and possibly also a Mull Historical Society gig. We tried to make up some kind of schedule when we'd be able to continue our studiowork with Julius but it seems very difficult to come up with times that'd suit us both in the near future. Hopefully sometime next week we'll get back to recording and whatnot, the absence from doing Graceskull things is doing my head in (that's probably a bit over-dramatisized way of putting it, though). There just seems to be a million things and duties that have to be done right now. Back with more pleasant news later this week, I hope.
27.05.2002 Another busy weekend yet again with no Graceskull related incidents. Damnit. Oh well, on Friday I spent the better part of the evening rehearsing with the Sugarrush. This nearly cathastropic rehearsal (bad playing and tired people) was saved by a song Coma came up pretty late in the evening. The song - also based on the chords of "La Bamba", hurhur - sounded like an instant hit and is now scheduled to be the opening tune for the band's next gig. This one is by the way the first Sugarrush song my vocals are featured in, woohah. After the rehersals our troops marched on to Vaasa's Kalaranta where we opened this year's Streetgolf-season. Prety crappy opening for Graceskull as Kena took first place with the Sugarrush boys tied on second, so me and Ilkka finished 4th and 5th respectively. On Saturday the Sugarrush rehearsed again with much more pleasant results and the new song kept sounding better and better. In the evening we headed over to Pietarsaari city where we caught the Swedish band Eskobar live on stage (originally also their opening act Creamstar was on our schedule but we sadly only caught their last song since our schedule was off at least an hour the whole fucking weekend). They looked great and sounded fine but the earth did not move nonetheless. Maybe it was their too-short bass player or maybe it was the cold weather, who knows? ? The next day me and Coma spent working-working-working on the ads for a future project of ours of which I might post info on later this week. Come evening we drove down to Turku - where we're bound to stay in for a couple of days - with Ilkka in the backseat. So next updates probably won't occur until my feet touch the soil of Vaasa in a few days' time. Then again, you never know what might happen...
24.05.2002 Just a minor media update as we've climbed onto Rumba-magazine journo Janne Flinkkilä's "current faves"-list in the most recent issue of the mag. How nice of him.
23.05.2002 Rehearsed with Firevision for the first (and possibly last) time yesterday for that "Lover"-rendition of theirs. They're in the midst of mixing their debut album so it was a lucky strike that they found time to rehearse at all. We're probably going to have the recorded version's background vocals there in the live version cause it sounded hella good and even better with some little ad-libbing. I'm kinda insecure how it's going to go in the end, the first notes are always so fucking hard to hit when you've not warmed up at all. We also had a listen to their upcoming debut single which they'd just gotten back from a mastering session performed in Sweden. Quite dynamic to say the least, I especially loved the drum sounds and the intro-fill. Ördi skördi bördi, the Swedes sure know their shit.
21.05.2002 I wrote a new song yesterday, called "Little Diva". The lyrics for it can be found in their proper place which of course is the lyrics-section. The song is one of those alt-country influenced slow tunes that Julius usually just ignores and nothing comes of them. I was thinking that it would be still fun to record these ditties (like "The Passenger" and "Sleepwalker" etc.)so maybe I'll swindle Julius into wasting like one weekend on them, recording them in a very minimalist fashion, just basic tracks and no programming. Maybe we could get an EP's worth of this shit. We'll see, that's just plans anyway because "Happiness" is first in line.
20.05.2002 Quite a busy weekend, this time even in musical terms, just not in Graceskull related ways. Friday night saw us jockeying some discs with the Sugarrush's fine fellows in Vaasa's Papin Nenä. The evening had been entitled "Rock My Heavy" which meant that most of the songs came from crackling 80's heavy metal 12"s (with the occasional exotic 3" CD singles having a couple of spins too). We had a great time but I have no idea if the audience did since the dancefloor was quite vacant although the place seemed to be pretty much packed. I guess as much as the common people like to flash the sign o' the Devil and namedrop Twisted Sister, they're not really feeling the shit. I mean, the hair and spandex may make us laugh but we really love the music and the whole world of things that was the eighties heavy metal scene. And the others - well, I guess they just don't get it. Sad, ainnit? Anyway, we also had old heavy metal videos shot on the big screen beside the DJ-booth which gave its extra-adrenalin to the feeling (except when the accidentally recorded Lionel Ritchie vid exploded on the wall). My personal highlights of the evening we're Anthrax's "Antisocial" and closing the night with Scorpions' "Still loving you". The whole hid list can be found in the dj-section. On Saturday we were meant to rehearse but in the end it was us (minus Ilkka) and the Sugarrush trying out some Kent tunes for a project that's due sometime late this Summer. I really thought that nothing would come of this project on our part (local Amarillo restaurant is having bands play sets of some other band's songs) but it turned out to sound really good and the songs came pretty easy. Normally playing someone else's songs isn't my cup of tea at all but this just seemed to work that good and of course the songs are just damn good which makes it a whole lot more acceptable. It's also nice to have four people singing. After the rehearsal cheesily enough we rushed to Rewell Center where we checked our "big brother band", the real Kent, out and in a word, they were fantastic. By now I hope all of you know just how fantastic so I'll save my breath for also complimenting the opening act, Mew who were basically just as good as one could hope an opening act to be. They kinda reminded me of a mix between Deus and Last Days of April and especially their drummer earned a gaping mouth from me - and I guess also others in our posse - because of his unique style. So a great evening with Ilkka to thank for it since it was he who was responsible for arranging the whole event. Moving on to Sunday then when we held a small music-quiz in Sky-Bar. It was a funny little event where Ilkka hosted (with an extremely terribly working mic) and I provided the background tunes. We had our own team also competing but sadly they were nowhere near victory and finished in third place. Oh well better luck next time I hope.
17.05.2002 Graceskull.com switched servers last night which resulted in the unfortunate fact that we lost two weeks worth of data. Nothing that serious was lost really, just news and guestbook entries but once having done some digging I managed to find the backup files for last night so now just about everything should be intact and as they were. If not, please drop me a line. Yesterday the extended Graceskull/Sugarrush-famiglia (even not-the-biggest-fan Julius who had returned from his road-trip in one piece) attended the premier for the new Star Wars flick. More and more I'm beginning to believe there's been a change of direction in my ageing process sometime a couple of years ago since all these childhood re-adaptations (like Star Wars, WWF-wrestling and Lord of the Rings etc) have had me all moved, teary eyed and sweating in my seat. This new film was just great - I could criticize a few bits and bobs here and there but I won't bother since leaving the theater I was all...well, moved. Okay on to the main business which - as far as I recall - is the music. Embassingly enough all that I have to offer on music news is that I've managed to find time to strum a little bit of the ol' guitar this week (for something like half an hour, we're oh so busy up in here, we are) and came up with a few good ideas. One of them was this pleasant little ditty thus far called "It's all ok" that I realized had La Bamba's chord stucture in the verse. A classic then? On a closing note I must return to the nostalgia-tripping once again since Graceskull DJ's (with some help from our friends) are spinning some classic heavy metal discs alongside some newer rock tunes in Papin Nenä tonight. The evening is entitled "Rock My Heavy!" and a flyer can be seen here. Come by and get some action, baby!
15.05.2002 With Julius still on the road and me embroiled in some other work I can only ease your hunger for updates with one more demo. This one's called "Splinter" and you can download it from the audio section.
13.05.2002 Not a lot happening on the Graceskull front recently since we've been scattered around the country. Last week Julius was briefly away on family business and early today he got up and left for a road trip to god-knows-where. I spent the weekend in the city of Mikkeli where my main business was to act as roadcrew to the Sugarrush who played a funny little acoustic set in a bar managed by their long-time friend (and crazy person) who we shall call by the name of Jani. The set was played during Finland's hockey team's match against Sweden or more specifically on the game's period breaks (they played five songs and then watched the final period and continued after it with Paati all teary eyed after the defeat). The next two days were spent just hanging around Mikkeli and doing some stupid shit which hardly is a surpise if you have a brief look at the crew and the state they were in. Definite highlights were our host getting thrown out of a bar a couple of times by himself, breaking a bed by slamming Paati on it with a choke-slam and relaxing at the hotel's hot-tub while glancing over the sunset. Luvly. Also one highlight was Weezer's new album which we bought five copies of in Jyväskylä and listened to every one of them (and them some) while driving across the country. We noticed that my copy of the album was the best. Why? Because it was my copy, that's why. I was very surprised it was so damn good since my gut feeling told me it was sure to be a massive let-down. Now I can't take it out of my CD-player, it goes very well with the sunny weather and the approaching summer. Recommended listening, folks.
08.05.2002 To celebrate tomorrow's Finnish national day-off (I have no idea what a "helatorstai" could possibly be translated into English) and the fact that we achieved fuck-all yesterday, I'm releasing one new demo tune for your listening pleasure. This one's called "The Three Legged Dog" and is downloadable from the audio section. Oh yeah and an update to the gig-calendar is also due since the last winter's cancelled Firevision collaboration is probably happening June 1st in Vaasa's premier festival Hietasaarirock. To recap this collaboration, it will be me singing their remix of our "Lover" backdropped by the beautiful setting sun. Yup, yup.
07.05.2002 As scheduled, we worked more on "Surrender" yesterday and were pretty proficient again. We recorded some more guitar tracks with the SG we borrowed from Andy J. and also a couple of decent vocal tracks which we discovered later on were unusable due to some buzzing in the background. Also some handclaps were recorded which is a first to us. The only missing thing in the song (apart from the vocals that we have to do again) now is the C-part and I think I have some sort of idea of it in my head already so it shouldn't build up to a big problem. Then on to the press where the local City-magazine published a pic and a couple of lines on us from our gig at the Sky-Bar's grand opening a couple of weeks back. Check it out if you like, you'll recognize the pic from Ilkka's brighter-than-bright neon wintertime gloves.
06.05.2002 Got some studiowork done on Saturday, actually quite a lot of it. First we recorded a couple of piano takes for "I wish I was drunk" which is frankly the only thing decent we've managed to get on tape for the song. It's another one of those songs that must be completely re-recorded. "Surrender" was also one of those before Saturday's session but now it's very near completion with the vocals and some guitar still missing. We worked on the song for something like five hours straight and recorded a whole heap of tracks (including guitar, keyboards, glockenspiel, etc.) and managed to get a rough mix of it too. There was a lot of improvisation going on also which was nice - though it must be pointed out that especially my improvisation means basically two bars' worth of good stuff repeated over and not some jazzed out shit. We also decided that we're going to attack songs with a different strategy from now on which means we'll get a song and finish it and then move on to the next one whereas thus far we've worked on a pile at once. I guess when we've got a certain amount finished we'll have to get some details worked right on the whole lot but all in all I think this approach could work better for our current state. The plans are that we're returning to "Surrender" again tonight for the vocals and some mixing. Although I have kind of a policy not to touch any song's lyrics once I have them ready for the first time, I felt the urge to rewrite "Surrender's" lyrics because a)I felt they we're crap and b)I felt like writing a bit of a different story that had more to do with my life at the moment. In the end I ended up changing only a couple of lines because the lyrics weren't as awfully bad as I remembered and the lyrics are tied to the song pretty strongly. So I guess my policy backs up the fact that most often songs reflect the moment they've been written in and my current headstate has to wait for a song to come along before outing itself.
03.05.2002 I happened to find a review of our very first gig on the internet which I added to the reviews-section. The complete original review can be found on Desibeli.net.
02.05.2002 In Finland we have this thing called "Vappu". It's a national holiday that is celebrated on May 1st. Originally it was a celebration for the working man but now it seems it's twisted more and more into another excuse to get shitfaced for a week. I guess there's nothing wrong with that if that's your scene but like often before I again realised this year that most of these mandatory party days aren't worth much in my book. If I stop and reminisce on the funnest times of my life it must be that these holidays don't come even close to the top 100. I can't really pinpoint why it is so but it seems that you're always stressed to have a goodtime on "Vappu" and the likes which might have something to do it. It's like a good song, you just can't force it. I hope I'm not getting too philosophical on your ass. Anyway, on the Graceskull front things were pretty quiet, Julius just had played some new bass on "Surrender" and also done a rough mix of it on Tuesday which we enjoyed the first thing once gotten out of bed Wednesday noon. It sounds very promising but it also sounds like we have to play most of the shit on there again. But it's nice it's taking shape and a bit different shape to the original idea which is always pleasant.
29.04.2002 It's always hard to come down after a fun weekend, especially like the one we had the week before but this past weekend was just a bit ridiculous. For the most part it was just fucking boring and stagnant but finally come Sunday evening we got some work done. We did catch a gig by the Balls on Friday night though but I better not comment it too much, let's just say that I can understand some people liking the band but it was really difficult for me to keep from falling asleep on the gig. But back to Sunday, the original blueprint for the evening was that we were going to get some rehearsing done but some members were unable to attend due to other stuff. On Ilkka's part it meant sweating in bed with helluva fever and an ear-infection or something like that. So we strayed on to studio with Julius and were pretty fruitful. We did loads of guitar and vocals for "Surrender" - a song which has remained untouched for months. It's beginning to find it's form now, we ditched most the electronics in the song and got a kind of intro going in there and Julius said it now sounds like "Demons"-lite. Also some demo-vocals and feedback mumbling were recorded to this Julius originated new tune. I have really started to like that song, it sounds like some 1940's New Orleans blues or something, really piano driven and slow. I really look forward to working more in the studio, hopefully we get back in there this week.
26.04.2002 Just a little r'n'r yesterday as we checked out Tehosekoitin live on stage. Although my allergy towards acts who sing in Finnish must be well documented by now, it's impossible not to like this band on a gig. Unlike last time I saw them they appeared to be very sober and it really showed in the way they played, it was tight as a motherfucker. After a few Steveweisers (as the beverage was renamed by Stone Cold in Smackdown a few episodes down the line - yeah, just can't stop the wrestling bullshit coming out, can I) Julius also started to feel the band's rock'n'roll message and began to explain excitedly how he was going to get back to his roots, turning into the rock'n'roll Julius he was, like, ten years ago or something. Threats about grease and leather were made but I kinda hope he wasn't that serious about all of it at least, Graceskull's gonna be a one-man band soon if he'll be spending most of his days riding on motorbikes and Ilkka will emigrate to the Ol' Blighty. Maybe I'm just getting a bit dramatic on your ass now, hurhur.
25.04.2002 A couple of new photographs are available here, courtesy of Jaana Toivonen from the Sugarrush fansite rocknrolltoy.net. Like yesterday's pics, these were also taken last Friday at our gig in Club25. Sprinkled on top and in between are also pictures of Leopold Delloria but I guess you couldn't confuse those young stallions with us old farts anyway.
24.04.2002 Pics I promised and pics you shall now have. So hitch on over to pictures-section and click open gallery number six where the fresh photos from our Friday's gig reside. These were taken by Michael Wägar.
23.04.2002 Meanwhile back in the studio...At last we managed to get our asses over to the studio again only to spent most of the evening re-installing the operating system onto the computer. We only managed to do a couple of mixing changes before the damn thing halted for good and come bedtime we'd only demoed "I wish I was drunk" and little else. Well I guess that's something at least. Some media we got working though so I'm proud to present you "The Building Blocks of Falling Apart" on MP3 over at the audio section. I also added lyrics to "KSK" - which is the Sara song we've translated and covered - to the lyrics section. I also have my hands on some fresh photos from Friday's gig right here but I think you have to wait a day or two before I get them on the net. Patience is a virtue, friends.
22.04.2002 So we took Nature Sucks Anyway Tour to Club25 on Friday and quite a night it was. First we took the stage a bit uneasy I reckon, at least that was how I was feeling. Apparently it still went OK according to record sales at least, hurhur. We played my new favourite song "The Building blocks of falling apart" as the last number and that I really did like, it's a good closing number and such an easy song to play even I can't fuck it up. Friends told me that the sound of the gig had been very nice so I guess there's really no need to complain there. Surprisingly enough my mother had snuck in in a hush-hush manner to see our gig which I felt a bit weird about first but then again it's great she's that interested to see what I do etc. Ending sentimental crap here, sorry about that. Once again next one to step up on the stage was Leopold Delloria who once again were in top form, I especially enjoyed their drummer's playing which looked and sounded better than ever. Then it became time for me to hop on the stage as a Sugarrush extra once again. I guess I could babble on about this gig forever but I'll just give you the main details about the gig. First off it must be said that analyzing this gig later on in the night we ended up witha conclusion that this gig had the maximum amount of stupidity we could cram into the space of 30 minutes. It started of with a dog-bark resembling chant while marching onto the stage with our fists in the air which followed me snapping a string in the course of the first few bars into the first song. Then via WWF-wrestler The Rock-aping and accidentally spitting at my sister we had the current Graceskull bass-man Jocke come up to Andy J. in the middle of a song and stealing the guitar from him and performing a kick-ass solo. Then the encore came. Umm, well if the encore's lyrics are "Jee-jee-jeesus" chanted over and over again and every member of the three bands is on stage, some piled on top of each other, when the song closes to the end, you get the picture. It was just chaos and I have no idea if anyone was laughing except for us. But once it was over we decided that once having taken this stuff clearly to some extreme, maybe it was time to shape up a bit. So next time you'll see a Sugarrush gig, it will be all shiny and sparkly and pleasant and odorless. Well maybe not. And to prove our point come Sunday evening (with some Saturday night drama left uncommented in this news entry) we lifted ourselves from the bottomless pit of stupidity with checking out some classic wrestling from '88 ie. Survivor Series featuring the gods Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant among other class characters. Maybe we should try harder...
19.04.2002 My neck is telling me I had a couple of gigs yesterday and as usual it is correct. First off me, Ilkka and Julius faced the couple of hundred free-beer fuelled people in Sky-Bar and it wasn't as bad as I feared it would be. The last rays of light were shining upon Vaasa's town square nine stories below as we played through a couple of our own songs and New Order's "True Faith". You'll find the complete setlist here. Ilkka wore these hilarious neon-colored winter gloves on his hands the whole gig, he'd brougt them along because I had recommended he'd dress warm because of the low temperature we had had in the soundcheck (Ilkka was unable to attend). After the gig I rushed downstairs to do the Sugarrush's soundcheck and the boys were left to enjoy the complimentary beverages. Leopold Delloria played first in their shiny white uniforms and the girls seemed to love them. Can't blame them there, singer Andy's voice is a powerful weapon indeed. By this time Graceskull's troops were beginning to close in on the state when the free booze kicks in which resulted firstly in Julius' bad temper because of not finding the restaurant's manager at that stage of the evening and thus not receiving his well deserved liquids. And in Ilkka's case in some bad mannered and controversial MCing (he announced the bands on stage) not to forget the WWF-wresting moves he performed on me. The Sugarrush rushed (hardy-fucking-har) the stage with a stunning rock'n'roll intro from Paati which once again showed that he truly deserves the alias of "Rock-Apina". Sweat was poured by the gallon and songs were played with guitar not-so-in-tune but with two encores, I don't think anyone was bored to death at least. My guitar kept fucking with me, there's something wrong with the mics - a problem which I hope to be avoiding tonight as we take our little tour to Club25. Fun night still all in all, a loving embrace to all who came by, hope to see you also tonight at Club25. And on a closing note, apparently "Lover" had been playing on Radiomafia (a Finnish national channel) the other day.
18.04.2002 Just some minor additions to my record list and daily favourites today. So yeah, I got the Notwist record and it's mighty nice. Tonight we'll be performing at Sky-Bar's invitation only opening party. Because free booze and a couple of hundred crammed people do not an ideal performing circumstances make, especially for a band like us, I have no idea what's going to happen. So it can be a wonderful experience or then a total let-down but luckily if it comes down to the second choice I get to transform my frustration to a more enjoyable form on stage with the Sugarrush later on a couple of stories down in Amarillo where they - and Leopold Delloria - perform as a part of the same festivities. See ya there!
17.04.2002 Another little rehearsal yesterday as me, Ilkka and Julius took it underground and played through the five (or was it six?) songs. They went okay, I guess though I'm still a bit nervy about the cover-song. After the rehearsals we caught Tuesday night's building tradition which is Smackdown. Although it was a great episode, Paati seemed a bit over-excited about it and kept performing wrestling moves to anyone in the proximity of three feet of him. He also went on to rave about some Pokémon episode he'd seen the week before. I reckon he had too much sugar in his bloodstream or something, it was dead funny though. Today I'm hunting records in Helsinki, I'm hoping at least Notwist's new disc would find its way into my rucksack before I get on the train back to Vaasa.
15.04.2002 Loads of rehearsals this weekend, brothers and sisters. On Friday I first gueststarred at the Sugarrush's rehearsals as the ever nearing Nature Sucks Anyway Tour also includes my stint on their extra guitar. It was a fun session after which we headed over to Amarillo to catch the Rasmus on stage. The crowd seemed to like the show but to me the sound of the place was just damn terrible and I really couldn't get excited about the whole ordeal. They are a good band on stage though, you just have to wonder how the singer Lauri can sing not missing a syllable while hucking himself about stage like a madman. On Saturday we got ourselves to the rehearsal studios once more with the Sugarrush and it was basically pretty much like the day before; songs went dandy and the mood was just plain hysterical. There's some new songs as well as older stuff in their set I really enjoy playing. On Sunday it was Graceskull's turn to rehearse, first with just the three of us as we tried to get the Thursday night's Sky-set in order and then later on Jocke and Paati also joined us as we played through Friday's intended set a couple of times. The latter part of the rehearsals went very good indeed, I had a great time playing and the songs rolled just perfectly. The first part went OK I guess but I had just some insecurities about how our shit will sound and work in that particular place. Also our cover song is a bit or a subject for worry, I just hope it comes out all right in the end and I wont forget the lyrics etc etc. All in all I had a great time playing music again this weekend. I think it felt particularly good because I've been up to my neck in other kind work recently, it's like grandmother's pancakes, they taste the best when you've not had them for a long time. On a sidenote I recommend you check out the Sugarrush's brand new webpages that've opened today, there even might be some revealing photos of this band's members in there somewhere: thesugarrush.com.
11.04.2002 I've now opened a new section called "press" to the site which is accessible through the link up there in the navigational bar or then by clicking this link if you're lazy. Hopefully I manage to get the older stories up there as well but for now it consists of the City-magazine article by Mikael Mikkonen which they published last week. And it's in Finnish only, sorry folks.
10.04.2002 Judging from the latest entry to our guestbook, there are people out there who are hooked to my daily rambling which is pretty sweet I guess. So sorry to have missed a couple of days' worth of news entries but the fact is that in the last couple of days nothing has happened in the Graceskull universe. I've been head over heels tangled with some other projects (not musical ones, I might add), Julius has been in his world of carpentry and Ilkka...well, let's just say that he's been caught by the spirit of the season. Spring had even brought him to write a tune that had Stanley Kubrick in its title, go figure.
08.04.2002 Some of you may remember me declaring that it would be a great while before I'd be on the decks again playing some crap music. Well it only took me this long because on Friday I had to get in the DJ-booth again at local bar Amarillo because they were short of a DJ that night. Luckily it wasn't as bad this time because there wasn't that many people there that night especially earlier in the evening so I even got to play good songs from the likes of the Strokes and the ever so great Les Rythmes Digitales. But that said, I really truly now am going to keep the distance from whoring around in the DJ-biz because it just ain't worth the headache. On Sunday we had rehearsals again and I was faced with a crew of totally hungover fucks - some more, some less so. We sketched out a setlist we're going to play at Club25 a few weeks from now and played through those songs and all in all I guess it went pretty good, some songs just were speeded up too much. Also some tired souls kept jazzing out into a world of their own where no note was too odd to accompany another one and no structure of a song was sacred but I guess that's just how it is when you're a true artist. Or then that's just how it is when you're truly dead tired. Are you beginning to see a pattern here? Are we always rehearsing when sleep has been scarce the night before? Quite possibly so but whatcha gonna do when a band has five busy heads in it. We might as well put rehearsing while not tired up on our "Things to accomplish with Graceskull"-list, right after making a triple concept album.
05.04.2002 The City-magazine with our interview came out yesterday so those in the vicinity of Vaasa city can pick up the mag for free in just about any restaurant or shop. Those a bit further away will be feasting their eyes on this baby next week as it should appear here. I don't think we came across as total idiots but there were some amusing facts in the interview that may or may not be beneficial to our career in rock, especially the one line about Ilkka's bedroom skills, hurhur. But, as they say, any publicity is good publicity. Julius has been onto his carpetering antics once again as he's been building some sort of cabinet for his Leslie-speaker at our rehearsal studios and since there are no other records there, he's been getting into Afghan Whigs' "Black Love". Apparently he's been spinning it almost 10 times a day but I guess there are a million worse records you could do your carpentering to. I've been trying out a couple of cover songs that we might be play at our next gig but at least the other one is a bit difficult to arrange to the minimal instumentation we're going to have there so we'll just see what comes out.
03.04.2002 A new feature added to the band members' personal pages as they now state the member's current playlist; songs, albums, films, etc. Check it out, boys and girls.
02.04.2002 Quite a busy Easter as we fitted a couple of rehearsals, an interview and a massive clean-up of the rehearsal space in the span of those four days. First on Saturday we rehearsed without a bassplayer, mostly just went through some new songs and stuff. I don't remember any details about it really since I was dead tired. After some pleasant party antics I woke up on Sunday probably even more tired only to do the extremely rock thing of dusting, hoovering and scrubbing our whole rehearsal studio clean. I guess it's not one of the aspects of rock'n'roll life you tell your grandchildren about but it surely does add to the feeling when you're rehearsing when you have the surroundings in check. Even before the clean-up we probably had one of the tidiest rehearsal spaces in Europe, but now it surely looks like a million bucks. It's very strange to visit other peoples' rehearsal spaces since they're damn nearly always like a disaster area, looking like it's animals that live there. Whatev's. After the clean-up operation and a much needed shower, we hitched on over to Amarillo to have a chat with City-magazine's reporter Mikael Mikkonen. I hope we didn't come across as the dullest and clichéd up men in music although that's just what I felt like after the interview. Tired head does not go well with interviews, take note. So even more tired we went on to rehearse some more, this time with also Jocke onboard and surprisingly it went very well. Especially "Demons" and "Building blocks" rocked precisely as they should. I guess some songs like "Silence makes us strong" still need some work but all in all I'm really looking forward to presenting our re-jigged liveshow.
28.03.2002 Demos, demos, demos. The final two demos I'll be making in a long while were recorded yesterday. This time I did the dynamic duo of "Make way" and "Morning came". Julius seemed to like "Morning came" which I thought he'd send straight to the "hopeless" bin. Still of the whole goddamn pack of demos, I'm most satisfied with "The Building blocks of falling apart" which I must admit to listening to far greater number of times than one should listen to one's own tunes. Well we'll keep it just between me and you, right? Then on to updates which come in the visual format this time, there's a couple of new photos by Kaisa Ritola from our last December's Club25 gig over at the picture archive so click yaself on over there and open gallery number five.
27.03.2002 Server is back up then, I guess there just was some kind of a mix-up with domain-name services or maybe something more hi-tech. Anyway, I've been most prolific in the past couple of days. Yesterday I demoed three more songs; "The three legged dog", "Sleepwalker" and "This easy life". They came out quite nice, I've even kept most of the songs from going all distorted in the choruses - I guess you could call it evolution on my part, hurhur. I might throw some tune in here next week if I dare, so keep you're eyes open. After my mighty demoing session, me and Julius drove to our rehearsal space and did some nicening up of the place (I think this weekend we'll be doing a real big-ass clean up of the place, the Sugarrush and us, or at least Andy J. threatened so). Julius also got his new shit more together and a fine noise it truly made. We had to play a couple of jams and "Last of the secrets" before leaving cause the whole sound was really pleasant, we'll just see how it's gonna be when we add bass and drums to the conclusion. On the addition front, I've now added the lyrics to "The building blocks of falling apart" to the lyrics-section, check 'em out if ya like.
26.03.2002 Our server seems to be down and the administrator guy is on vacation so I have no idea when it will be up again. So instead of getting the promised lyrics of "The Building blocks of falling apart" up here with a few new photos to boot I worked on demos most of the day. I recorded "Building blocks" and also the other newbie "Splinter". I guess I'll be demoing more stuff tomorrow.
25.03.2002 A most pleasant weekend, ladies and gentlemen. On Saturday we checked ourselves into our rehearsal studio with a brand new bassplayer Jocke Kulju, yet again an excellent guitar player whose talent we're wasting away on the old four-string. The rehearsals went very well indeed as he seemed to learn new songs in an instant (well I know they're elementary but anyway) and we even managed to get "Silence makes us strong" into playable shape which we've not managed to do thus far. On Sunday I spent most of the daytime once again working on new material and finished one of those new songs I've been dangling with. It's called "The building blocks of falling apart" and from the title on up I'm really excited about it. I'm hoping to get it demoed someday soon and the lyrics should be with you in the span of next few days. Aside from doing a bit more carpentering on Sunday, Julius had been fixing "Kid with the fiery eyes" at least and playing with his new amp which seemed to work very well in Saturday's practise - and of course, most importantly, it looked cool.
22.03.2002 Some operations in the new song territory as I got this one newbie in a decent condition and then got some "well-at-least-it's-a-start" type of thingies out of my system. The near complete song is called "Splinter" and its lyrics are to be seen in the lyrics-department. Julius had bought some new amp (or was it even a couple of them) since his old Leslie-preamp was a bit too self-destructive, it's only a matter of minutes into playing with it when something is burning inside. Hopefully tomorrow we'll be rehearsing so we can test that new equipment.
21.03.2002 I finally managed to get a hold of some new records, it's surely been a while. And as usual, you can see them in my record collection page. The Electric Soft Parade disc seems to be well fitted to the season at hand judging by the couple of times I've had time to listen through it. Recommended listening to happy people.
19.03.2002 Some minor work on new songs yesterday as I made a visit to Julius' place to see what he had come up with. He had two versions of the song he'd been working on and couldn't decide which one he preferred. The other one was a bit Portishead-ish while the other one was in 3/4 time and had that nice piano to it. I think I preferred the one with piano and we did some planning how to develop the song further. Then when I got back home I fiddled around with the new songs and even meant to write some lyrics to one of them but I managed to fall asleep before getting my notebook out.
18.03.2002 So we finally got our asses over to Tampere's Sylvester pretty late Friday night in the dead cool dirty-ass Mercedes we had managed to get the infamous Don Vinocchio to drive. The gig was pretty low-key which suited us just fine with Jukka Kujansivu from the band Prisondream opening the evening with a song dedicated to his grandmother whose funeral Jukka had attended earlier that day. Quite a trooper that guy since he had also arranged the whole gig that night, I don't think I would have that kind of strength given the same situation. After Jukka's song Antti Westman played some tunes which I regret to say I mostly missed because of talking to friends from Tampere I don't get to see that often. Also to blame is the fact that I was a bit nervous so my concentration wasn't worth crap. Which was proven when we took the stage as the our set was kind of messy and strange. We didn't follow through the setlist we'd made at all and especially when we closed in on the latter part of the set we didn't know which song we wanted to play. So this is why the setlist I've added to songs-section is more like a guess 'cause I don't quite remember what the list was like in the end. I hope it sounded alright though, at least we got an encore so it couldn't be that bad or then the audience was just really drunk. I think Mr. Kujansivu got the gig on minidisc so maybe we'll get to experience the horror ourselves someday and check out which songs we played. We stayed over with friends and proceeded to drive back to Vaasa - relatively early on rock'n'roll standards - with great spirits as the sun was shining so beautifully - the Spring really is approaching, my friends. On Sunday I worked on a new tune again but didn't really get anywhere with it. Julius had also been working on a new song which he was very enthusiastic about but despite my pleas he wouldn't let me hear it yet. I think we'll be back in the studio again this week then as the songs are piling up. We'll see if that Spring 2002 deadline holds for the record.
15.03.2002 We ran through today's gigs intended songs yesterday very tired so they were played not so tight. Oh well, I at least slept a bit better last night then I've done the whole week so I guess that's an improvement at least. Well we will see the outcome of this loose rehearsal schedule in a couple of hours time, bring your friends.
14.03.2002 A couple of attempts at rehearsing down, I guess getting those bass-players to the rehearsal facility is nearly an impossible task. So instead of belting tunes with the whole band I strummed a bit at home yesterday with quite a fruitful outcome. I got at least two song sketches out of my system but not having checked what they were like since, I can't say much about them or if they're of any use. I think I should go through my tapes sometime soon 'cause I think there might be a lot of good stuff there that I've just basically left to rot. We had a talk with Julius about the future sleeves for the future album and have now a pretty good idea of how we'd like it to be. But since we need some photography done for it and you never know how that comes out, there's no sense in planning them too precisely. Like with the last sleeve we had to scrap the whole original idea and it wouldn't surprise me if the same thing happened this time.
11.03.2002 I did some more demos Friday night which might end uploaded here sometime in the near future. Maybe. I did "Wither" and a cover of "KSK" which is a song by Sara. The latter was done because I had a conversation with a drunken Jorma K. who is the vocalist for the said group a couple of weeks back and there was talk of us possibly covering their song for a future b-side or something. Because of the state he was in I didn't much expect him to remember any of the crap we talked about (and it proved to be the way things had gone, hurhur) but I liked the idea and began work the very next day. Since singing in Finnish is not really an option for me I somewhat translated it into English and toned it down pretty extremely. When I had it processed I figured that very little of the original was there anymore, like it was a completely another song but once having listened to both songs back to back, it is still recognizable which is nice. But we'll see what will be done with the song, I guess the demo will end up here anyway even if the boys from the band hate it and nothing happens with the b-side project - if you are that curious to hear it. On Saturday the other 'Skull boys were entangled on a completely different project as they played with this strange ensemble in the middle of the day in the department store Anttila. Julius played some Lego-keyboard they sold there and Ilkka sang largely made up lyrics to Bomfunk MC's "Superelectric" (which surprisingly was a pretty good version), Kylie's "Can't get you out of my head" and that goddamn Shakira song. It was a strange event but I have to admit that it was quite funny. Not to end odd side-projects there Ilkka continued the day's performances with reading some of the diary (or something like that) he had kept when he was a teenager at this International Women's Day event. He made it into a true spectacle and really came out as such an artist. I guess some of the deeper thoughts left one or two persons teary eyed in the audience while us friends of Ilkka were pretty much just amused. We can be such assholes from time to time but having gotten down from the stage even Ilkka confessed to being quite amazed how fucked he had apparently been at 17 years of age. So in the end I don't know whether we've grown up more stabile or more stupid but I don't know if I even care.
08.03.2002 To make the pain of waiting for one more week for our Tampere gig (wink, wink), I decided to give you a little earcandy. I recorded a demo-version of "Can't forget" yesterday evening with Julius' self-made mic and considering that it's basically first-take everything, it sounds pretty nice. It's a bit too slow still, I guess. Anyway, hitch on over to the audio section to download it. Other media for today is Jukka Kujansivu's (yes, they're related) poster for next Friday's super-sure Tampere gig, clicky here. Ilkka had gotten a letter in the mail yesterday in which it said that he had been accepted to this musicbiz-school in England. As great as it is, this kinda brought me down since I'd rather keep him here, you can never have too many good, good friends. Of course it isn't 100 proof that he's gonna go there but the chance exists, all he needs now is a shitload of money since studying that crap abroad ain't exactly dimes and nickels operation. Whichever way he chooses, I hope it makes him happy.
07.03.2002 Strange things goin' on in Tampere city as our gig got postponed and rescheduled for the second time already. The new date is 15th of March and the venue still is Sylvester. I hope this dates sticks, damnit. So I got the skateboard flick in the mail yesterday I was babbling about a couple of days back and boy, was it a fine film or what. I must admit to having kinda lost touch to the skate-world recently so seeing 45 minutes of hard-hitting Finnish action I was amazed at what these guys can pull. Especially the part of "Kärä" Korhonen - that's the part that featured our "Try again" - blew me away, no wonder he's been placing high in recents vert pro-contests across the globe. So I really have to feel honored to have had our music in this production. Go buy "The Kuumotus" now from skateshops all around Finland or Rocsport.
05.03.2002 Some setbacks with gigs, brothers and sisters. This Friday's gig is going to be played by a near-Graceskull entity as it seems that Ilkka is going to have to stay in Vaasa due to some muy importante business stuff. Bummer. And as if that wasn't enough, Firevision had to cancel their Ove-featured extravaganza because of promotional duties (read: shopping with their stylist, hurhur) in our dear capitol of Helsinki. But I'm sure we'll get back on dat ass eventually. We had a rehearsal again yesterday and once again the crew consisted of very tired people so we had Julius wearing his suitcase on his head this time etc. Well at least he's given up on mimicking our savior. But in the end we got the songs in pretty good shape and managed to end the night with a rocking blues song with a hard-hitting harmonica solo from J-Lo himself. And on a final note we have a song featured again in a new skateboard film called "The Kuumotus", I should have more info on this when I get the flick myself later this week.
04.03.2002 A weekend recap, ladies and gentlemen. Saturday saw us packing ourselves into a car with the brand new remix from TKK and driving a couple of hundred miles to see Weeping Willows. And when I say remix, I meant it in the loosest sense of the word since he had basically taken about two samples out of our original "Try again" and made a song of his own called "Yritä uudestaan" which at least is our title translated into Finnish. But nevermind the bollocks, it was a good tune and exactly what we want of our remixes - the song turned upside down. Back to the car then, we had our vehicle tech Don Vinocchio drive through the moody weather like a true McRae to the odd location of the Willows' gig - a ski resort basically in the middle of nowhere. Even their vocalist admitted to having had a hard time finding the place as it even wasn't on the map. Despite the murky prospects the gig was just faaantastic. They played all the right songs, were nice to the small crowd and once again their bass-player looked like the coolest thing ever to walk the face of the Earth. That man really brings out my (and apparently I wasn't the only one) not-so-heterosexual side. On Sunday, having woken up late in the afternoon to the beautiful weather I grabbed my guitar and finished the tune I had fiddled with earlier this week. It came out really good I think, I'm really excited about it but once again I don't have a suitable title for it. I think I have to settle with "Can't forget" for now, the lyrics are here. Then later on me and Ilkka caught an excellent movie downtown, called Amélie. It's from the French director who's previously done Delicatessen (a great one also) which was visible in the visualization of the film which was done perfectly to every last detail. But as if it wasn't enough that the film looked as though it would've taken 20 years' effort, the whole story was just wonderful and full of positivity. It's really hard to find this kind of positivity in films of today, usually it's a bad omen if someone uses that word to descibe a film. But believe you me, this was truly a touching film which basically improved my life. Recommended viewing, brothers and sisters. On the update-front Julius had found this one review of our last summer's split single from some metal/goth-magazine that I've added to reviews.
01.03.2002 Here we have it! The new face of Graceskull on the web. I hope it's easier to navigate and more pleasant all around. There are a lot of little details I have to add and work out but the basic stuff is now all here. Also some info is kinda out of date but I'll get the facts straight and updated in the coming days so I suggest you keep an eye out for new stuff coming to all the sections. Any comments and info on broken links etc. would be greatly appreciated either in the guestbook or by mail. Totally new are at least the StreetGolf pics in the pictures-section's gallery number 4. They do make me miss the summer like a ton...
28.02.2002 Not a heap of news for the time being since I've been up to my neck in the not-so-rock'n'roll world of work. I managed to strum half a new song onto my cassette-recorder though and it did still sound quite promising this morning. There are a few more bits and pieces on tape which might prove to form into songs later on, it's just unfortunate that I haven't had time to just sit down and do something to them. Oh well, everything's temporary so I guess if they're good enough they'll stay good until I get the time I need.
27.02.2002 We've now had 5000 visitors on this site since its opening about a year ago. Thanks alot, especially the frequenters.
26.02.2002 So a bit of rehearsing again yesterday. Julius had brought his suitcase organ along this time which he intends to use on Tampere's gig week and a half from now and we had some minor difficulties getting it mic-ed. In the end the sound was fine, even too loud at times so I guess we'll manage with the thing. Paati was also in attendance to get some hints about the new songs. At least some ideas were put to "This easy life" and "Last of the secrets" but I guess with at least the latter it's best that he hears the recorded version first. Some songs went really good indeed but some just fell under the table so it probably won't be hard to pick out which songs we'll play eventually.
25.02.2002 Weekend got off to a nasty start as on Friday I heard that the night before Paati and a friend had had a gang of eight retards jump them for no apparent reason. Luckily Paati escaped only with a few bumps and a swollen thumb (although they had kicked him in the head like a thousand times etc) but his friend wasn't as lucky as he left the hospital with a neck-brace and stitched up eyebrow. I just can't figure out why something like this happens when we should be about a millennium away from the Dark Ages. Fuckers. Anyway on Saturday we did some joint deejaying at Amarillo in Vaasa, I spinned the discs while the boys - Ilkka, Paati and Coma - digged out the crowdpleasers. Unfortunately this was pretty much unlike the deejay-gigs we've done so far because of the punters which accepted no songs outside the top 20 which basically meant we played that fucking Shakira-song seven times in four hours. Christ. But we still managed to sneak in the odd Strokes and Paus tune here and there without getting our life threatened (except for Ilkka who had a customer grab him by the throat since we hadn't played the Afroman-song he'd requested). I really can't deal with this kind of people, to put it kindly. I guess I'm just that elitist or something, which I guess is a bad thing but their world just seems to be aeons away from mine so we don't mix. I don't think I'll be doing this kind of deejaying in a long while since it just ain't worth it. So no song-list this time either, hurhur. On Sunday luckily we got down to something with a more upbeat tone, namely studio stuff. We recorded guitar, vocals and xylophone to "Promise" which is now lacking just some more guitar and little else. Also we re-did the ending vocals for "Last of the secrets" which had had some timing difficulties in the previous sessions. It was a nice relaxed Sunday session with the sun shining and us listening to some nice ol' soul stuff and Bowie classics in the coffee smell on breaks. I love that scent, I do. I've even considered taking up making coffee as a part of my morning rituals even though I don't even drink it. It's just a damn shame the stuff tastes like crap.
21.02.2002 Finally back in the studio. We recorded a bunch of guitar and vocals mainly for "Last of the secrets" which is sounding better and better every day. I just wonder when we are going mess it up with something but I guess we're beyond that point already, that string-riff we have on it just wipes the messy stuff under the carpet. We also recorded some sleigh-bells on its C-part which sounded nice added to all the tons of percussions it already has. Then we tried to do some guitar and vocal stuff on "Kid with the fiery eyes" but it came out in bits since I had my telephone ringing the whole time during takes and when doing guitar, my wrist got tired really fast since that song has a lot of hard chords at least for my poor wrists. Basically my technique is just as shit as they come. Julius called me up later on in the middle of the night to tell me that he had managed to get drunk in the few hours between ending our sessions and the call and now he'd gotten back from the bar and was mixing "Kid". He said (among other not that sensible things) that it was coming out nicely and he'd manage to get some good stuff out of those cut-up takes. Whether these proclamations are of any value when having another listen to the stuff sober, I have no idea but this does prove where Julius' head is at. Your average Joe would've probably gotten shitfaced whilst zombified in front of the weather channel or something but Julius gets his six-pack and starts mixing. What a work-horse.
19.02.2002 First off a newsflash! The gig in Tampere on Friday is postponed due to some scheduling difficulties or something. Anyway the gig is now rescheduled to March 8th which I guess is even a better date since there seemed to be a lot of gigs happening in Tampere this Friday. But then with the urgent matters dealt with let's recap some of the happenings this weekend. On Friday me, Ilkka and the Sugarrush's Coma did a bit of deejaying at Club25 after a gig by Firevision - a great gig I might add. We only played a brief set but it was great fun still, playing Kylie, the Crash, Pink and the Strokes back-to-back, hurhur. On Saturday we kept on deejaying but this time we just deejayed at each other, picking some surprise classics off my shelf at my place and watching some Smackdown. It was good fun, too. Either that WWF world is still electrifying to men of our age or then we've just never gotten past our teens. The latter explanation is more probable, I think. Okay, come Sunday we rehearsed some and it was a hilarious rehearsal. I try to remember now why it was such a hilarious rehearsal but I just can't really pinpoint it, we were just all tired and everything was funny. Julius even played through every song with this lightcord (the Sugarrush's fans might remember these from their past gigs) around his head occasionally claiming to be Jesus. And no, not even Julius was drunk. After the rehearsal I went to check out what the boys had done the weekend before and it was all good stuff. Some of the vocals on "Darling little bird" were definitely best Ilkka has ever done, real good stuff. I can't wait to get back to work in the studio which I hope will be tomorrow.
13.02.2002 We did a bit of a rehearsal session yesterday, the three of us. We made a list of songs - about 15 or so - that we might get to work with a stripped down style and played through a couple of them. I think we might try to play a few more songs from the album this time around if we get them working. Ilkka managed to break his guitar even before we'd started, the bit that holds the plug in the socket broke off. I hope he manages to get it fixed before the gig.
12.02.2002 I made some flyers for the Tampere gig last night. Click here, here and here to take a peek. It seems that Antti Westman from the Tampere band Killpretty does a solo set there the same night too.
11.02.2002 I spent the weekend out of town rockin' and rollin' on a cruise ship to Stockholm (lo and behold the 'taches and mullets aboard!) and in Turku also with some friends so it was up to the boys to hadle the business. Ilkka had checked out Sara live on Friday and apparently the gig was good as their gigs oft are. Their sound is just amazing. On Sunday Ilkka and Julius had been in the studio and had recorded a lot of different stuff to "Darling little bird", at least vocals and guitar. Once having had a listen through the other stuff on the works Ilkka deemed it to be chorusless and basically as prog as the stuff we did earlier with our other band Contrast. I have to disagree though or then it wouldn't be so shocking to later on realise that I just can't see the stuff as such right now. But prog or not we're all happy with the shit, it's going to be some album I tell ya. And weekend report concludes with a gig announcement: we're playing a stripped down acoustic gig (just the three of us with no bass and no drums) at Tampere's Sylvester in couple of weeks' time, February 22nd to be exact.
08.02.2002 Yesterday I spent the whole evening designing a new layout for the website. I hope it will be ready for the site's one year birthday which will be in a month or so. Stay tuned.
07.02.2002 Orange alert! The cast is off! Yeah after some four months of wearing that bloody thing on my wrist it's now officially off. Instead I now have this softer kind of aid on it, I am short of an English word to decipher it I'm afraid, sorry. The benefit of this contraption is that I can take it off whenever I want to and it's lighter but I have to wear this for two months more. Anyway I am really glad to be rid of the purple old thing, don't miss it one bit. Other things that have gone on recently are pretty much summed up in the word Prisoner. I got myself the DVD box-set of all the episodes of the classic 60's series the Prisoner and now I pretty much spend all my spare time watching them, just can't get enough of it. I remember watching it when I was young and it's even better now when I get more of the different aspects of it. I have to say that after Twin Peaks, it's the most fascinating series even gone on the air. I think they're even rerunning it on Finnish SubTV at the moment so advise you to check it out. The reason I got into the series in the first place was that being 11 years old, Iron Maiden was a heavy influence on me and they had a couple songs based on the series. One song - cryptically entitled "Prisoner" - even had a sample from the dialogue between Number 2 and Number 6 (the main characters in the series) from the show as the intro which is now forever etched into my mind. "I am not a number, I'm a free man."
05.02.2002 So I got me some new records.
04.02.2002 It sure is hard getting back to the normal routine after tours. And since right now we're talking about a two-day tour, I really can't blame the bigger boys of getting their heads screwed on backwards after some months with no sight of home. But I really can't complain once again as the whole trip to the heart of Finland had a life-prolonging effect to the fullest as I only remember about a handful of silent moments, the rest was basically just max-volume rock or max-volume laughter. Since we were pretty tired already once departing from Vaasa the standard of jokes never really reached even the halfway mark to good taste and like many a time before half the crew were awarded new aliases, some of which are better left uncovered. I guess the highlight of all the stupidity abound was reached in a contest in Ilkka's hotelroom (Ilkka was onboard as the tour manager and we also had a professional driver onboard, the almighty FLB aka El Terminatór) at about seven o'clock Saturday morning. I guess the only detail about this contest I can reveal is that I won, rest is better left unsaid since there might be some minors in the audience. After that we went to get some breakfast and managed to even sleep a few hours before the hotel staff implied that the time had come for us to get the hell outta there. After some hours spent dispensing our cash on records and some fresh clothing we headed to Ylöjärvi where we played a hilarious gig. The stage was very small and Andy managed to get his knee fucked up again halfway through the set but everything turned out good in the end. Thanks to our trusty driver we managed to get our asses to Vaasa in time to catch the last few minutes of Papin Nenä's action. Unchronologically speaking Friday's gig in Tampere was fun, too, and my compliments go out to both Klubi's and Doris's deejays who both played excellent music. In the end even I had to get myself on the dancefloor but only for duration of one song because err, well "mature sucks anyway" as the boys put it, hurhur. Julius had had himself also some good times on stage in Vaasa where he had rocked some Kylie Minogue and tango-tunes. During the evening he had also joined a bluesband and had had his beautiful Yamaha organ both praised and ridiculed, to make a long story short. Some fuckers just don't understand a thing about aesthetics. Anyway, to sum up the weekend I'll just use the term fun. Fun.
01.02.2002 So as the smarter ones have already figured out, the Sugarrush is playing at Tampere's Klubi tonight and at Ylöjärvi's Työväentalo (or something) tomorrow and as the super smart ones already guessed they're letting me play the extra guitar again on both gigs. Why they let me do that is beyond any comprehensible explanation. External Graceskull activity is abound also on Julius' part since he's going to get on stage in Vaasa's Amarillo on Saturday. He's going to be a part of some peculiar line-ups (at least the tango-playing project was confirmed last we spoke) due to the Wasa Band Jam which is kind of a free-for-all of Vaasa musicians. So keep your eyes and ears open, boys and girls.
31.01.2002 Me and Paati worked a little on some material for his solo-project Monkey Monday. It came out sounding a bit like Teenage Fanclub I guess but I don't think all the details are there just yet. Or even nearly there. I woke up with sore shoulders due to the fact that I haven't been sleeping good of late and hanging a guitar on my neck for a couple of hours must've had something to do with it since it's been a while I've last done that, playing around with the acoustic ones takes it's toll. Also one more fact surely contributed to the soreness of at least my left shoulder which was running into Andy J earlier in the evening. He was on the mood for some punching again (he is known as El Homosexuál de la Forza around these parts) and unluckily his target was my shoulder which he jabbed half a dozen times before his caveman urges were fulfilled. I hope I play all the right notes on Sugarrush's gig tomorrow and the day after so I get to avoid any more bruised members. Rock - it's not the safest of businesses. But on the most important of news, it's Ilkka's new haircut! He's had it trimmed to a Limahl-type look and it looks just wonderful, the hockeyhair mullet, the mohawk dye, the works. You just have to see it in action cause I don't think we'll be doing any photoshoots in a while although there's been some talk of one but nothing confirmed.
28.01.2002 Having been to a Vaasalaiset kansiot gig on Friday I was delayed from entering the studio as early as planned on Saturday so we only got some mixing done and recorded a pianotrack for "I should know by now". I liked the piano very much but on Sunday Julius told me he had cut it out of the final mix. Apparently that song and "Outside" are pretty much done now. "I should..." is a classic example of our odd production method, originally it was intended to be just dead simple four tracks and that's it and now the final mix has I guess four times the original plans track-quantity and there the space-guitar and all that crap. Well at least we've managed to keep both parts of "Snowflake" pretty simple. It may not be much but we're trying, hurhur. And on Saturday I got my hands on the skateflick by Tommi Kortesniemi. It's called "Fun" and that name definitely compliments the film as after watching it I was really happy, the feeling of the film reminded me of good ol' times' skateboard clips. There was clearly some hard work put into the film which was especially visible in the graphics dept. We were featured in the intro section ("You could be the on") as well as in the closing credits ("Beautifullest lie"). It's a product I'm really happy to be associated with, to get the vid click your way to Tommi's homepage, his contact info should be in there somewhere. And according to reports the video should also be available from Helsinki's Ponke's skateshop. This concludes today's ad-feed, thanks for plugging in.
25.01.2002 Finally got some studiowork done yesterday and we worked pretty hard. Mostly vocals were recorded (for "Outside", "Night falls" and "I should know by now") but also some acoustic guitar, percussions and guitar originated effects for "I should know by now". Julius also played some bluesy guitarsolo all over "Night falls" and I must admit some of it sounded eerily good, I guess it is a blues song then as he insisted. Julius also had both parts of "Snowflake" now finished and damn did the piano on part one sound good, you gotta love it. I also love the fact that the piano mic we used has leaked Julius' thumping to the rhythm, it's one of those little things that add that little something to the song - brings it to life. Okay, enough sentimental bullshit, we're hoping on getting some more work done this weekend if we find the time. I think we might even sneak a little preview of some song in here so check back next week, kid.
24.01.2002 A couple new gigs confirmed as we're a part of Nature Sucks Anyway Tour. This impressive moniker is actually just the two dates in our hometown of Vaasa so far but I guess we're trying to get the rock'n'roll circus immigrating also to other cities. On April 18th we're playing at the opening night of Sky Bar after which the Sugarrush and Leopold Delloria, who are the other two bands on the bill, are rocking Amarillo restaurant about 6 stories down. And because we love our fans of all ages, the next day we will all be playing at Club25 where there are no age-limits. It's going to be a blast, great bands and great music, dontcha miss it!
23.01.2002 Luckily other people are doing work on our behalf. I got the mastered Atyd remix on Monday and it's very good, really apocalyptic, end-of-the-world-ish and the like. The beat on it is hard as a brick. Funny to hear "Beautifullest lie" transformed into that kind of shape. Also some news on the audiovisual front as we have apparently a couple of tracks on a brand new skateboard video. I'll have more info on that next week as I'm supposedly getting a copy of the flick this weekend.
21.01.2002 Ilkka had his birthday last week and on Friday he had a party to celebrate this occasion. On location with their acoustic three song set were the young stallions of Leopold Delloria, a great performance although their last song was a bit ruined by the DJ in the next room who started blasting Dr. Alban classics during the latter part of Leopold's song. I really can't compliment Andy's (that's the singer) voice enough, you gotta love it. After the party me and Paati headed over to my place to listen to some Bad Religion classics on vinyl since we'd been getting all nostalgic about the band on our way home. Once having blasted through a heap of songs we decided that maybe Graceskull should cover one of these great songs. So the next morning I found myself learning "Skyscraper" off "Recipe for Hate". I have no idea what it should sound like but we'll give it a go if the other boys won't protest, I guess their relationship with the aforementioned band isn't quite like mine and Paati's. Oh well, we'll see about that. Rest of the weekend was spent laying around at least on my behalf, I have a feeling that Julius has been ditching himself into that tech-void once again. But I don't mind as long as he finds his way out of there in time for our recordings again. I hope we'll get some work done this week, people have been asking us what's up (and also many have been upset that I haven't been updating this page as frequently, hurhur, nice to know you're hooked) and I always hate to say "nothing much". Fucking wrist, I sincerely hope I'll get the cast off next month, I'm dead tired of the goddamn thing.
16.01.2002 Apparently the feared hardware conflicts did make their appearance after all so I dunno what Julius is going to do about it. The buzz the new hardware creates is kinda cool sounding but I guess when it's sprinkled on everything we record it's not that nice. At all. He had also mixed "Not that fast" and "Night falls" pretty much complete, just some minor vocal things needed and some adjustments to the former. They sounded very good and less bass-y than our earlier efforts.
15.01.2002 Julius had spent the whole of last evening playing with his new toy and he seemed very hapy with it although there had been some unpleasant info about possible compatibility problems on the net. I managed to revive myself a bit from my slack-o-rama of late and got myself up from the couch two times, first for this new bit of a song and then for writing down some more lyrics for another new song. I think it could be even somewhat finished so the lyrics are now up in the songs-section. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, it's called "Morning came".
14.01.2002 It's been a while. Well I'm pretty much short of explanations, on my part the silence at the beginning of this year's been much the fault of my desire to just slack off. I don't know where this state of mine has come from but I simply don't feel like doing anything on my time off. Well of course we might subtract spending money from that equation, I managed to buy a few records on my trip to Helsinki which of course means that they are now added to my record list. We checked out Leopold Delloria's gig in Vaasa's Keltsu on Saturday since they had our part time bassdude Andy J. filling in for their MIA bassdude. The gig was nice but it was really the warm-up act Kurator that gave me the chills, they were fuckin' rockin'! Their set consisted of heavy metal classics like "Mr Crowley", "Breaking the Law" and "Holy Diver" backed with their own soon-to-be-classic rockers. Their vocalist was more or less preaching the holy gospel of heavy metal to the crowd and we swallowed every word with no hesitation, he sure was convincing. After the gig we ran into Julius who had apparently talked with yet another bassdude who had kinda promised to get on the wagon for some future gigs but more about this in the near future. Julius also has gotten himself some new hardware which he's been very excited about which is funny since the package containing the stuff is still in the post-office as we speak but I guess tonight he'll be head over heels concentrated on some hi-tech stuff to get our recordings go even smoother than before.
04.01.2002 Damn what a day yesterday, I was so damn tired and out of practise with the acoustic guitar I couldn't believe it. We tried recording some guitar tracks with Julius but I guess basically all of them ended up on the cuttingroom floor as they say. Terrible. To even out the bad karma, I managed to get some lyrics written to that tune I fiddled on the day before, maybe it will emerge as a real song even.
02.01.2002 Nothing better to start a new year with than a hefty dose of rock, I'm sure! As promised we made a brief visit to DOM bar earlier on Monday evening to play three acoustic numbers, among them Graceskull's "Not that fast". We had no PA system which made making ourselves heard a bit difficult since the place was packed with alcohol fuelled people but they we're nice people as were the staff of the bar in question so I think it went quite well. After that we rushed on to the other venue, Amarillo, where we caught the new year's fireworks on the roof, some excellent stuff. Then we proceeded with the Sugarrush's show of musical fireworks which turned out to be a very fine gig although once again my playing was miles from perfect. Towards the end of the set we had our good friend Nicke Hägen come on stage in a stylish leather jacket and the tightest spandex pants you've ever seen with pilot shades to boot posing as Rob Halford as we rocked heavy through the classic Judas Priest tune "Breaking the law". Fantastic. And of course heavy metal didn't stop there as our encore was another eighties classic par excellence, Twisted Sister's "We're not gonna take it". It was really nice to have many friends on location, thanks especially to those who were helping us out that night. Since we are in Finland, nothing better after a gig than some sauna action although the action part was a bit...hmm, how should I put it, disturbing. I think I threatened to write the whole 411 here on what happened but having had a day to think about it I just think I'll leave it up to your imaginations to make up what a handful of rockers, unlimited booze supplies and a penthouse sauna adds up to. All good fun, though. Whilst in sauna we heard that there had been police cars and ambulances outside the venue after the gig which was quite rock'n'roll but apparently they were there because someone had been spraying pepper spray around. I guess the amount of assholes around increases on these holidays, that just some stupid shit right there. Logically having slept the better part of Tuesday, I basically got out of the bed for just two things: eating and writing a new tune. And talking about great tunes (wink wink) I have to recommend this Paus song "Kärlekens tunga" (a cover but great nonetheless) which I have now listened to on repeat for about two hours straight.
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