It’s been quite a while since Älymystö stepped abroad the last time, a situation that definitely had to be remedied. In the beginning of 2010 we had a very good reason to do so, since Älymystö and ATYD published a split vinyl 19:38:00, right for the Christmas eve. Our album publication mini tour took us to Tampere, Helsinki, Tallinn and Riga, this time with a full complement of six people. Our on and off cellist Ms. Savisalo has been attached as a permanent member of the band and this was the first time she was properly on the road with us. Being a professional folk musician she isn’t a stranger to these kinds of trips.

TAMPERE / VASTAVIRTA

In Finland this winter has been colder than usual and there has been enough snow to get the railcars stuck around the Helsinki downtown. This of course had the potential to make transporting the band and the gear rather interesting. When we arrived at Tampere’s Vastavirta club it was a toasty -19C and going colder towards the night.

Vastavirta is a nice club to play in, but unfortunately it’s some way out of the city downtown. A lot of people opted not to brave the cold weather and a potential half a hour walk back to civilization, but nevertheless we did manage to gather a nice comfy audience and also get our gig juices flowing again. Right after Mr. Paalanen’s DJ gig ended we hopped into the car for a night drive back to Helsinki.

HELSINKI / KUUDES LINJA

Our second gig took place in Club Kuudes Linja, where I personally always love playing in. The place has quality PA and a friendly staff, and with their machinery I can invoke the kind of bass growl out of my theremin that it makes everybody’s prostate vibrate. This was the last time Torture Torstai clubs were arranged in that venue and we were honoured to be the closing act, along with ATYD.

In the previous day Mr. Paalanen had got an idea: why not webcast the whole gig? We had done this earlier, of course, from our Russian tour. Back at that time getting just a sound stream going was a bit of a hassle, never mind streaming real time video. The web technology has had a few years to develop since that and now there are simply amazing tools out there to broadcast live stuff, stuff like Justin.tv. Essentially, after the registration it took three minutes to get a stream going. Unfortunately we didn’t have a proper camera and we had to use the Macbook Pro internal microphone since there were no free outgoing lines on the mixer. Nevertheless we got a nice online audience, big part of which consisted of the wonderful motherfuckers of Whitechapel, who also did a good job spreading around the word. Thanks guys!

We got out of the club and back home a bit too late for my liking, since our ferry to Estonia was due to leave at eight in the morning and I still had some packing up to do. I had to put together my tour gear, but in addition to that I had to pack stuff for the next week’s work trip. Timo and I were heading off to Germany to do stuff around Iron Sky and the gap between coming home and leaving again was just a few hours.

TALLIN / ROCK STARS

Against all odds we managed to get on the road in time and arrived to the ferry terminal early enough for Timo to have time to get his suit, which he forgot at home – a foreshadowing for things to come. Tuomas from Neverdice had suggested that we should rent a conference room for the trip, which we did. It turned out to be a perfect way to do day trips on a ferry if you are traveling with a band. You get a nice big room for the gear and the bags, with some floor space to sleep on. It also only costs around 40 euros, which is nothing when divided across all the band members. Our little conference space didn’t have the heating on, though, but apart from that it was a handy thing to do.

(Check out the full photoset in Flickr!)

The next leg of the trip was to head over to Tallinn’s Club Rockstars, where we arrived yawning and groggy. The last time we played there was our Atomgrad album publication tour and the place had made an impression to us with it’s decoration and mood. Turned out that it wasn’t just nostalgia, since the place was just the kind of rock club I’d like to see in Helsinki area: several underground rooms, a bar on the street level, nice decoration and once again really good food. It was at this point we realized that we have forgotten a bag full of cables in Helsinki, not to mention our stage backdrop with our logo in it, most of Mr. Haapanen’s outdoor clothes and Ms. Savisalo’s cello resin. The theme of the trip started to form.

Mr. Paalanen fixing his guitar with a rusty nail.

The Tallinn gig was also streamed out to the net, this time with the laptop connected directly to the mixer, which did wonders for the sound quality. The gig itself went well and it was my favorite from this trip. We played all of the songs more or less without a hitch, people were comfortable on the stage and Mr. Eskola found his inner bass animal and had such a frenetic stage show that I was half afraid he’ll brain me with his bass neck.

"All the proceeds from the merchandize sales will be spent on beer, as demonstrated by our representatives here."

Most of the band turned in early, but Mr. Haapanen and Mr. Vuorensola stayed up to party, stomping into our hostel late in the night surprisingly – though relatively – quietly. Mr. Vuorensola delighted everybody by setting his alarm to go off at eight in the morning, and himself snoring all through the whole damn racket, ass up in the air.

Our accommodation was the hostel Old House and I’ll have to give it a bit of a shout out. The decoration and the rooms in the place were nice, especially when we got an another heater for us. The staff was friendly, in the morning there was a good breakfast and they even lit the fireplace for us. After the antics of the previous night a nice morning moment in front of a crackling fireplace felt real luxurious.

RIGA / ELEKTRA

Finally it was the time to jump into our rental van and head off to Latvia/Riga. When we were packing up our stuff, we found out that the bag with Mr. Paalanen’s guitar pedals in it had gone missing. After a few moments of frantic searching someone called the ATYD guys, who realized they had accidentally taken it back with them to Finland when they left for home the previous night. One of them is working with air freight and they tried to slip it in to a plane so it would be in Riga when we arrived there, but no such luck. It wasn’t a disaster for us, though, since Mr. Paalanen was able to work around the pedals and rebuild his signal path, and we had the time to buy some new DI boxes without which Ms. Savisalo couldn’t have played at all.

The Sturm logo.

Via Baltica was in a much better shape than in the last time I had been driving on it, also on the Latvian side. Surprisingly the roads were almost snow free and dry, and the paving had been repaired from the potato field it was the last time, especially on the Latvian side. Going to play in Latvia has always been a pleasant adventure and this time wasn’t an exception. Our destination was not Depo, but something completely new, Club Elektra. It’s a place built by the industrial collective Sturm in an abandoned fur cap factory in the industrial area of Riga. In the Soviet times the factory used to be a military secret, since hey, you don’t want the capitalist swine to know how many fur caps you are building for your army and deducting your troop strengths.

This is an underground-credible aquarium if I've ever seen one.

So, it was late in the evening when I negotiated our large van into the yard of an industrial building. There was snow outside, stars sparkling in the sky and only one illuminated door. It had one of those slits which you could *kseeesh-klonk* open, so you could peek through it and ask in a rough voice who’s at the door. Soon our contact came to greet us and we were up into the coolest fucking club we’ve ever seen.

Elektra is basically an undergound club built by the Sturm members and assorted artists. The club has a cinema with several rows of benches, a bar and a club area where you can watch the movies from several monitors set on top of a pillar, a dance room for DJ’s, a smoking room, a big and heavy aquarium with carps swimming inside and of course a stage with kick ass paintings on the walls. It was like stepping into a club in set in the Fallout world, with a dash of cyberpunk thrown in. It was made all the more precious by the fact that at any given moment the authorities might find out about it and tear it down.

Paintings on the gig space walls.

ATYD had left for Finland, but we got Niko Skorpio and Ovro to play with us in the club, where they were already waiting for us. The only slightly negative thing about Elektra was that although there were large butane heaters and stoves around the place, on the stage it was cold enough to make the breath cloud up, and apparently cold enough to freeze up my theremins. Before the soundcheck I had to go and find a wooden stove and use it to thaw the theremins to get any kind of sound out of them.

Mr. Vuorensola is getting into the mood during the sound check.

The gig itself was really fucking fun to play. I had some technical problems, having to do with us dithering around about the setlist before the gig and delaying it for long enough that my theremins had frozen up again. This was the first gig ever where I had to swap the theremins after each song and basically stick one of them in my crotch to warm it up enough to be able to play for a couple of minutes before it refroze.

Ovro on the stage.

After the gig ended it was almost three in the morning, which is when the partying started. We had agreed that since I’d have to get up rather early to drive, the first half of the band would leave for our accommodation quite early, but not surprisingly there was a whole lot of dallying around and a long long drive through unlit, snowy and ice covered roads to the cabin where we stayed the last time too. The financial crisis has hit Latvia really really bad, so they don’t even have the money to tend some of the roads, which made it very interesting to drive a van at six in the morning and sleepy as hell on roads that were dark, icy and occasionally narrower than the car.

The morning found me with 3,5 hours of sleep under my belt, Mr. Paalanen extremely hard to wake up and Mr. Haapanen naked on the downstairs floor, laughing and telling everybody to come for a morning sauna. In other words band business as usual. The morning sauna was a really terrific thing to do. In spite of the disorganized state people were in the morning hours were fun and pleasant, people got their stuff together with awesome efficiencty and we were back on the road in time.

Niko Skorpio.

The drive home was beautiful and uneventful. Outside it was a regular winter wonderland with Latvian houses huddling under a thick cover of snow, sun shining down from clear skies and Mr. Haapanen alternately laughing and snoring on the back seat. The lack of sleep hit me only in the late afternoon. Luckily I had Ms. Savisalo to keep me awake by chatting with me, and in the latter stages of the trip I was hysterically amused by anything I saw.

On the ferry we sat in the main bar, chatting about the trip and feeling generally pretty happy about it. On the whole we had lost or forgotten our backdrop, a bag of cables, two jackets, two sets of gloves, one wool cap, some cello resin, a small led light, etc., so as our artist pal Evestus said in Tallinn, we’ll be lucky if we are still wearing pants when we get back home. Anyway, the gigs went well, everybody was in a good mood thorough the trip, there was a whole lot of net love for us because of the direct feeds and so on. Definitely a trip worth all the trouble and I sincerely hope we can do it again soon!

(Check out the full photoset in Flickr!)

Heading back home.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are happy to have you join us live @ Kuudes Linja. Here we go!

EDIT: The gig is now available as a recording. Click to make go. Yes, next time we’ll be using something other than the built-in mic on the laptop.

EDIT2: We cleaned up the clips a bit, so there’s no dead air there.

Enjoy!

Hey, gang.

The split release with And Then You Die and it is now available at least on iTunes Music Store. Spotify should follow soonish. There will be a collectors’ edition 12″ vinyl picture disc of this available on April 1st, at which time we’ll also put up a free download of our half of this split vinyl.

Meanwhile you can listen to our half of the whole thing on our website by clicking on the Sounds of Waking Dreams in the banner.

Here’s a press release on the proceedings as well as the mini tour we’ve got going.

Onwards toward 2010!

Jan 06 2010 Tampere, Vastavirta (FB, Last.fm)
Jan 07 2010 Helsinki, Kuudes Linja (FB, Last.fm)
Jan 08 2010 Tallinn, Rockstar’s (FB, Last.fm)
Jan 09 2010 Riga, Elektra (Älymystö single act + support) (FB, Last.fm)

So, after a bit of a pause Älymystö will take on the road again, this time to celebrate the release of our new split vinyl album with ATYD! This time we’ll making a road trip of traditional proportions – we’ll start off from Tampere, get down to Helsinki, then hop over the Baltic Sea to Estonia and Latvia.

Check your calendars people and see you on the road!

A couple of weeks back we had another Band Camp practice weekend. For the first time ever we didn’t go to Mr. Haapanen’s home farm in middle of nowhere, but did the deed in a civilized urban area. Well, in Tampere anyway. The weekend was very productive: we got most of our new songs approximately in a shape to be played in front of an audience, so just a bit more honing and we’ll be ready for our new album tour in January.

Oh, speaking about the tour, most of the dates have been confirmed, so there will be more information soon.

In any case, here’s the video!

Now it’s finally official: Älymystö / And Then You Die split album titled 19:38:00 will be released in 24th of December as a digital download. The album will be available in iTunes Music Store, Nokia Music Store, Spotify and selected other on-line services right in time to offer you some easy listening for the Christmas Eve. If you are more into large discs and diamond needles than download services, you’ll have to wait a bit longer: the collectors edition picture disc will be released in 1st of April 2010.

We will also be on tour in the beginning of the year and you’ll be seeing and hearing us in both Finland and Baltic countries. More information incoming as soon as we nail down the exact dates and venues.

Meanwhile check out this ad / mood piece of the oncoming record, made by Skithund Records:

So, we have good news for all of you Spotify fans out there. As of today, our full length album Atomgrad is available in Spotify, so just click here and tune in.

Right now our latest publication, a split vinyl EP, is still in the production line, but things are certainly moving forward. Also, we have a new tour coming up, so stay tuned!

In the beginning of May we released a remix-kit of the song Revitty, which is from our upcoming vinyl release, for you people to torment and abuse. All in all we got five submissions before, around or blatantly after the deadline. As is our habit, we took our bloody time going through them properly and hammering together our thoughts about them.

The summarize the results, you guys rock. All of these submissions are distinctly unique and take the song in directions we haven’t even thought of. So, here is our scientifically rigorous analysis of the remixes.

Remix #1: Lacuna Origin

(download)

Herra Haapanen: This one has more balls than a porn star and a heavy atmosphere. One of my favourites, altough at times the song shakes the listener out of the atmosphere it has created, which I find distracting.

Herra Vuorensola: I fucking love the dirty ass-busting rape by Lacuna Origin, especially the knuckle-dragging beats and bass that makes your prostate jump rhythmically.

Herra Paalanen: The first remix came to us from Lacuna Origin, and boy, it’s a slow and heavy one. The melancholy twang of the original takes wonderful a pummeling from the rhythm section.

Herra Honkonen: This remix conjures up an image of drinking for weeks alone in your cabin, and in the end of it all sitting in a wood shed holding an axe wishing for somebody, anybody, to step in through the door. The crunchy, downright crusty soundscape adds brooding rage to the atmosphere of the original song in a great way.

Herra Eskola: For the first time on anything I’ve ever recorded, the bass sounds as it should! This one takes the listener deep.

Remix #2: Very Sharp Knives

(download)

Herra Haapanen: A comfortable voyage to peaceful surroundings and the tranquil moments of life. Quality ambient that keeps the song recognizable, good work.

Herra Vuorensola: Let’s see – some electronic farting with melody saved from the original version, and no vocals (yeah, well, some but basically none) – could go wrong, but manages to actually create an atmosphere of “let’s-sneak-into-a-nuclear-reactor-for-a-fuck-without-a-condom-just-to-see-how-badly-deformed-kids-we-can-produce”. And as we know, badly deformed kids are always good. And fun.

Herra Paalanen: Number two was quite the departure from the first one. The huge jump from Sweden to Australia seems pretty appropriate, as Very Sharp Knives came to us with a very abstract and glitchy reworking. The guitar is drenched in delays and reverbs, and as for the vocals:

The vocals are still there, and I think they’re audible at high volume, but they have a denoiser set to remove the entire voice part, leaving the weird random beep artifacts, and only mixed in for the choruses.

Herra Honkonen: Minimalist, atmospheric and disturbing, but at the same time soothing. For the probably biggest ambient fan of Älymystö this was a real treat. For the first two seconds the electronic brrrps sounded a bit silly, but they took a complete 180 degree turn to an awesomely essential part of the song.

Herra Eskola: I’m not much of an ambient person, but listening to this actually made me feel good and… mellow. Believe me when I say, these are both totally new feelings in the context of Älymystö!

Remix #3: Invisible Waves

(download)

Herra Haapanen: The intro is brilliant, which made it a disappointment for me to hear my own effect laden drum track. The old drum track disturbed the new and interesting atmosphere.

Herra Vuorensola: I was hoping to explore more of the ambientish sounds now floating in the front, and would’ve enjoyed not to hear too much of the original song hidden in the background, because I’ve always thought of this song as being a melancholic love song for those who just like to fuck corpses, and whenever the state of melancholy is reached, it makes me feel good.

Herra Paalanen: The third remix was done by Invisible Waves, who make the whole affair sound like your neighbours are really up to no good. Nice ambience from the reversed samples here, and a surprisingly eastern shift in the tonality there, too. I picked up a bit of CMI vibe as well, although I’ve no idea if that’s just me.

Herra Honkonen: I have a dark past as a fan of synthesizer music, so the airy electronic sounds combined with a whiff of the bass line sounded almost nostalgic. Then in came the drums, which felt like having some guy poke you rhythmically on the ribs while you’re trying to have sex. That bothered me in the beginning only, since later, for example around 3:40, the drums fit really well into the flowy and psychedelic atmosphere of the song.

Herra Eskola: Scifi atmosphere… I love it! Hearing traces of Vangelis and Brad Fiedel. How cool is that! This is something I’ve never before associatied with Älymystö either.

Remix #4: Zha

(download)

Herra Haapanen: The song with the best production values and also my favourite. The song is renewed in a brilliant way – even the vocals got used, although the remix was done by a woman. Now then, what would beat regretting a rape with dubstep as the soundtrack.

Herra Vuorensola: Dubstep? Let’s see, what kind of stuff is dubstep. Bonk-bonk-pappadappa-bonk-da-bonk? Wise choise here is definitively to pick the melody and bring it to the front – I feel it’s a quite good melody, and gives the back structure to the song. I don’t know, this feels quite damn good remix for me, and has space around it to enforce the unique elements – I love it. I’d say it’s the best of these remixes. By far.

Herra Paalanen: The fourth one comes from Zha and I guess it was about time we got our dubstep on. I’ve personally been on a huge dubstep kick lately, so this one put a big old smile on my face and a nod in my neck.

Herra Honkonen: The production values of this remix are simply great and the approach is stylistically quite surprising. This song is so fucking solid that it’s one step away from going into fission. If I had to force myself to dig something negative to say out of this, I might have wanted to hear a bit more of the original themes.

Herra Eskola: I’m a relatively simple grunge guy, so I have no idea why this is called dubstep instead of triphop, but I take Mr Paalanen’s word for it. Musically I don’t get it for some reason, but I appreciate the creative approach. The song really gets into another dimension.

Remix #5: Niko Skorpio

(download)

Herra Haapanen: Having Niko Skorptio take part in the challenge was especially heart warming for me. Remix is on the same neighbourhood as Zha, but surprisingly in a slightly more positive light. An interesting combination of summer mood and murders.

Herra Vuorensola: For me, as a vocalist and as a lyricist (which, I have to admit, sounds quite glorious compared to the fact that I just shit some words on paper and growl them out in front of the public), I think songs as stories and although most of the time – if I don’t know the story, I don’t miss it. But when it comes to Älymystö music, I’m always a bit on my toes when the story gets mixed. So, to put a long story short, as a song, I think Niko’s remix is just completey awesome, a perfect remix, but it’s hard for me to listen to, since I’m waiting too much for the story and miss the song.

Herra Paalanen: Another lovely, bass heavy rendition. I don’t think we’ve ever had quite this much crossover club potential, and this still retains the unpleasant edge of the original. Wonderful. I especially love the synths. Love ‘em.

Herra Honkonen: Sometimes music speaks to the listeners, and what this remix says is “Yay, let’s get fucked up on wine coolers and cocaine and kill people!” Niko Skorpio’s remix takes the original song, dresses it up in a tuxedo and gives it a martini. This remix is the dude in the classy club who has a roll of duct tape and some plastic bags in the glove compartment of his car – you know, just in case.

Herra Eskola: There’s something very “loungish” and “clubby” in this one. The song almost gains commercial potential! Yet the nightmarish feeling of the original is well present.

When we set up this remix challenge, we specified that this is not really a competition as such, since making music should not be a contest. Nevertheless we promised merch and free beer for those participants whose remixes we like, and you know what – we liked all of these enough to cough up a free Älymystö T-shirt (we hope you are our biggest fans, because we got only XL sizes left), a complimentary Atomgrad-album, and of course a free beer, if we manage to bump into each other during our travels.

So, all of you glorious motherfuckers e-mail us your contact info to alymysto (catturd) alymysto dot com and receive what’s rightfully yours! No, we can’t mail the beer.

For the rest of you, this is not the end of the remix project! The remix kit can still be found here, so if you feel you’re up to it, hammer and brutalize the tracks to your heart’s content and sent the result to us – we’ll be sure to give them a shout out here in the blog and comment on them!

Last night I sat down after a very busy and stressing week, got a shot of Laphroaig and listened through our new split vinyl material. It’s always vaguely embarrassing for me to listen to music I’ve been involved in and end up thinking “this is so fucking cool”, but that’s how I felt. Well, Tom of Finland said in an interview something on the lines of “I draw only stuff that gives me a hard on”, so what the fuck – if you don’t like the stuff yourself, how could the listeners. The split vinyl will feature a song we’ve played live quite often and which has ended up as one of my personal favourites – thanks to Mr. Paalanen managing to make a surf guitar sound so depressing and melancholy I want to slit my wrists.

But enough of waving our collective cock around about the new materials. It’s now a couple of weeks since we updated the website and got things rolling. From our point of view this has been quite a resounding success. The visitor amounts have pretty much quadrupled and the feedback on the site has been incredibly positive. We are really happy that the visitors have been as stoked up about the site as we in the band were. A big shout-out goes to the site designer Toni Uuttu, whom we can heartily recommend.

Our decision to release Atomgrad as a free download has been extremely well received too. There are about 350 direct downloads of the album, plus at least 135 torrent downloads. The latter figure is probably higher, since well – torrents are designed to keep all kinds of nosy cunts out of peoples private business and consequently statistics are hard to come by. It’s also been really gratifying to see the amount of listeners go up in Last.fm. Don’t forget – if you want to support our various illegal, disgusting and at times downright surreal lifestyles and habits (not to mention our music projects), you can pay for the music in various easy ways.

We also got a lot of shout outs, including but not limited to the following: Piraattipuolue, Fun Pastimes for Stupid Children, Binge on Crack & Tiramisu (cheers on the blog name, man), Roklintu, 22, rue Menthe, Mike Pohjola (x2), Heijastuspinta and of course the magnificent bastard Warren Ellis. Thanks, man – as a journalist the idea that some day we of the trade might be carrying bowel disruptors has kept me and my journalist fiancee sane throughout many a difficult day.

Now, upwards and onwards. Soon there will be new video material of Älymystö playing in front of an audience of celebrities and well known party people, shot and edited by Kerhohuone of Tytär. Stay tuned!

Ps. Facebook-users – go and add this blog as your favourite. Now. Go!