So, things remain to be rather silent for Älymystö, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t play live in different projects. In this summer I toured as a member of NEGA, a shapeshifter-project founded by Mr. Pilvari Pirtola around 10 years ago. My time is too short to fill you in with all the details, but we played in 2+ Year Anniversary of Servataguse Muusika @ Tallinn, Estonia & 4th Kuucvaals industrial festival @ Lielauce, Latvia. This time NEGA was Mr. Pilvari, Mr. Paalanen & me – and to maximize the live effort, the tour also included solo performances of both NOSFE & TAPHEAD in both locations (for me, one show per event was enough and I decided to be just merrily drunk, enjoy the events and catch the latest news from all my Baltic friends). All in all, it was the best weekend of this summer for me, so a huge thank you for everyone involved.

So, here’s a video from our 22th of July live show at Kuucvaals. The sound quality isn’t perfect, but that will be fixed later on as the whole show will be released as mp3s on a certain web-label. Stay tuned for that.

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!

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!

Yesterday the morning came all too fast. The mounting exhaustion made me sleep like the dead even though we were in a train, and getting up was very difficult. There seems to be a water heater in every Russian train car and you can get coffee and tea for free. The instacoffee made my brain start enough that I managed to gather up my luggage and head out to another cloudy and sleety Russian day. We decided that we’d need an one hour nap in the afternoon, but as it turned out, we didn’t have the time for that until very late in the evening.

Our first stop was the club Platforma, where we were supposed to play in a jam session later in the evening. We ordered some breakfast and ate it, slow and bleary eyed. Then Gosha went once again “maybe a little vodka?” and dashed out and across the street to buy a bottle from a nearby shop. The food and alcohol pushed away most of the tiredness and exhaustion.

At that point we heard that a nap and a shower could not be arranged because Juri and Elena, in whose apartment we were staying again, weren’t at home. Either Gosha or his girlfriend suggested that we visit a local public sauna instead, which was a terrific idea. So, we left most of our worldly possessions at the club, including cell-phones, wallets and passports. On the way to the sauna we stopped in an internet cafe so Mr. Vuorensola could upload an entry to the Star Wreck blog. Then it was the time for the Russian sauna experience. The place was extremely street credible, it was a sauna for Men. It was the kind of sauna where you bathe, then go and practice sword-fighting naked and do bench presses with Hetians, with and without chariots. The washing room had long benches made of metal and stone, there were large metal pails with birch and oak vihtas in them, the shower booths were also made of metal and the water jet was so strong I could use it to massage my sore shoulders. There were rusting, scalding hot pipes that bled steam into the room and in a corner there was a tall but small pool filled to the brim with ice cold water where people were jumping in. The hot room was large and the sauna stove was built into the wall. We didn’t have any kind of slippers and the sauna floor was very hot. Actually hot enough that when I took a few steps towards the stove to check it out, I managed to burn the soles of both of my feet bad enough that I got a blister.

That kind of sauna was just the thing we needed. After washing ourselves and drinking some beer and water we were feeling refreshed and marginally more awake. From the sauna we walked to Nikolai’s apartment to relax for a moment, before heading out once again to see an art movie in a massive soviet era cinema, which was like a dance hall. The movie was very interesting, it was basically free association about mining, video effects and a noiseish soundtrack. Although I really liked the movie, I had incredible difficulties with keeping my eyes open. I simply didn’t have the willpower to keep myself from nodding of every minute or so. After the movie Mr. Haapanen went to intercept the director of the movie. A very elegant, beautiful and businesslike woman came to talk to us, asking who we were, what we thought of the movie, what kind of music do we play and so on. The whole situation was unreal and weird in a positive way.

After the movie Gosha bought a little bit more vodka and we finally headed for Juri’s place to sleep. When we got there with our stuff, it was eight in the evening. Elena made us some tea and we crashed into the bedroom. Well, at least Mr. Paalanen and I did, since Mr. Haapanen couldn’t sleep and Mr. Vuorensola spend the time playing Grand Theft Auto on his laptop.

An hour of sleep felt like too little, but combined with some more green tea and vegetable stew Elena made it helped us to perk up. After the light dinner we spent some time watching Elena’s art, which were these surreal and incredibly detailed black and white drawings with some coloured ones thrown in. Watching them made me want to try drawing once again. About ten years ago I did try to draw comics, but I didn’t have the self discipline to cross the first plateau I reached with the learning process. I think that it might be the time to try and cross it again.

When we got to the club, the other bands had already stopped playing. Gosha said “maybe a liter of vodka” and ploinked a big bottle on the table. In the bar some girls recognized me and Mr. Haapanen from previous night’s train. Like so many other people who came to talk to us spontaneously, they were fans of 69 Eyes, HIM, Apocalyptica and other well-known Finnish heavy and rock exports. We rigged our stuff on the stage, helped by an extremely cute girl tech of the club. I don’t know what it is, but girls who know their way around tech or play electric guitars get extra points of sexiness in my eyes.

The jam-session was interesting and it went reasonably well. Nikolai came to play his electric jouhikko-like instrument with us and Gosha played stuff from his laptop in the mixer cage on the other side of the room. I don’t really know how long we played. I enjoyed constructing all kinds of loops I can’t do in our proper songs. An extra layer of difficulty and at the same time interest was brought by the fact that it was a dark ambient jam, not a noise one, so loud and raw sounds were out of the question.

The evening took a turn for the worse after that. We had ok time talking to the girls from the train and a very flamboyant and talkative glam rock guy who attached himself to our group. When we started packing up our stuff, Mr. Paalanen realised that his Apple PowerBook was missing from the backstage. There was only the empty bag, but no computer. We searched every possible and impossible place in the club, but there was no sign of the machine, so the only conclusion was that someone had snatched it from the backstage. I have never seen Mr. Paalanen that angry.

Being in somwhat low mood we carried our stuff to Juri’s and Elena’s apartment. I had drank only a few pints of beer and a couple of vodka shots, but I was feeling strangely drunk. After discussing the laptop situation for awhile we turned in.

This morning waking up was very difficult for me. I wasn’t feeling hangoverish as such, only extremely exhausted and completely spaced out. Mr. Vuorensola and Paalanen went to register our visas and to buy us the train tickets. I had promised to do that in the previous evening, but I was simply unable to stay awake or even think straight. Skipping on a promise made me feel shitty, but I would have done more harm than good trying to negotiate my way around Russian bureaucracy feeling like that. The weird feeling didn’t seem to pass and I started realising what it was about – we had been eating very lightly in the previous day, while walking and exercizing a lot and ending the evening with alcohol. I ate half of a chocolate bar we had in the room, and in ten minutes I was feeling much better.

We packed our stuff, said our goodbyes and Gosha grabbed us two cars from the nearby road. We had barely some time to buy us some food before it was time to board the train, which is where we are sitting now. We are in between countries, on the way from Viaborg to Vainikkala. We just passed the border formalities and one of the guards was very interested in our band. He asked for a CD, which we of course gave. Everybody is tired, smelly but happy. This has been simpy an amazing week. We have seen pieces of country that was mostly unknown to all uf us, met a lot of friendly and very talented people and got to know new interesting music. Special thanks go to Gosha for looking after us through the week, his beautiful girlfriend for acting as our translator and guide, Juri and Elena for letting us stay in their cool apartmen, Liza and Vanya who were our hosts in Moscow and Nikolai for a great jam session.

I think almost everyone in Finland has certain preconceptions about Russia, even though one doesn’t take them seriously, but this visit challenged many of them. I certainly want to go back, either for a sight-seeing holiday or to play more gigs. Ideally, both of the previous.

I woke up at relatively early in the morning to the lovely squaking sound of Mr. Vuorensola grinding his heels against the tent matress he was sleeping on. I heard later that he had passed out in the other room and deposited by Mr. Haapanen and our hosts to the floor. Not an easy feat since Mr. Vuorensola is over 190 cm tall and weights well over 100 kiloes. Tired of the squaking, I fished the pillow from under his feet and threw it at his head, and a bit later digged out his sleeping bag and put it over him as a cover. I got a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep after that.

At noon we got up and our hosts fixed us a breakfast. Mr. Vuorensola was a bit green around the gills, but hey, three bottles of vodka is not so bad for that big a man. I had been stupid enough to carry half of my stuff to the apartment, not realising that I would have to carry it around when we went for another walk around Moscow. My right shoulder was starting to have opinions about lugging so much stuff, in the form of a throbbing infected pain, but luckily other people picked up some of the bags.

This time Red Square was open, but unfortunately Lenin’s mausoleum wasn’t. When we walked past it, the guards asked our Russian guides who we were and asked for their papers, so at least we were suspected of being terrorists. Kreml was a very interesting place to visit. We were told to keep our mouth shut and not look or sound like foreigners. The reason was that from the old Soviet era some Russian people have the idea that all foreigners have a shitload of money and they’ll try to rip people off. It started right at the baggage check in, but our hosts argued with the officials until we got the same price as the Russian people (and some very sour looks). Kreml was an impressive place to visit. Because we were cheap bastards and our schedule was pretty tight, we saw most of the buildings from the outside and only peeked into the churches from the doorway (getting more sour looks). The weather was again very Russian. People from the warmer countries keep going on about dry heat versus humid heat, but the same holds for cold. There was a wind that was bitingly cool and humid. It was the kind of cold that invites itself into your clothes and stays there, seeping slowly into the bones. Taking pictures got difficult after awhile because it was nigh impossible to get your fingers to warm up.

After Kreml we got back to Dom to drop off our luggage and went shopping. Mr. Vuorensola finally got a replacement for his bag which had been disintegrating throughout the trip. We went to the grocery store with very hungry eyes, which resulted in buying two bags of sausage, bread, meat pastries, candy, energy drinks with 9% alcohol, pickled cucumbers, vodka and a whole chocolate cake to share with our hosts. Food and vodka returned the warmth to our bones.

It was the night of our gig and our web-broadcast. I went to tinker with the computer and of course there was a problem right from the start. The web camera which had worked very well at home and in the previous day suddenly vanished from the computer. It couldn’t find it no matter what I did, until it suddenly reappeared, causing the webcam program to reset all the settings. I had to modify the code on the webpage on the fly, while at the same time trying to figure out if the stream was working. The woman who was running the mixer board was very helpful, but communication was difficult because we had perhaps 25 common words in any language. The stream volume was too high for the laptop and there might have been some impedance problems because the input was the laptop microphone plug. I spent a great deal of the evening standing next to the computer, adjusting the levels from the table and the computer according to comments I got in irc from Finland and the other guys listening to the stream in the loft of the Dom. The webcam was working properly, but it is a shame that you can’t really zoom the picture. In the cam feed Dom looked like a small clubhouse, when in reality it was a rather big place with a lot of people. In the end everything worked out pretty well. There was a small problem with the stream, since the music in between the bands and the announcements weren’t going through the mixer, so it was dead air and sounded like the stream had been cut off in the other end. The actual stream was good enough to hear the lyrics properly, so we chalked it up as a success.

Then it was the time for our gig. I had to leave the streaming computer unattended, but against all odds it didn’t crash, catch on fire or explode. The gig started really well, although the mood of the audience was impossible to determine at first. We toned the stage show into noise instead of a rock gig, which seemed to be the right call. It seems that in Russia the noise and industrial scene is more about art than anger. People use a lot of background videoes and the audience sits in chairs to watch the show like a theatre or something. It’s a nice contrast to the Baltic people, who seem to be all about anger and a sort of punk attitude, in both music and partying. There were some technical problems with our equipment again, but Ripa was on fire with his guitar and we managed to patch up the stuff that didn’t work. Playing theremin was enjoyable, since the sound tech was again good and I got out the lowest tones of theremin which made the room vibrate. During our gig we apparently managed to break some of the PA. At least the covers of a couple of the loudspeakers flew into the room, which was just fucking cool. After the gig people came rushed to us to tell how good the gig was, ask for autographs and so on. So, either they really liked it or it was a very good bluff. Either way, it worked for me.

Photoes from the gig, by Darkiya.

My weird-o-meter doesn’t go off very easily, but later in the night I had one of the TOP-3 weirdest conversations I’ve ever had. It was the guy who had made the video I wrote about in the earlier entries. He was this guy dressed in leather, with a long beard and a cap that looked like an American civil war time soldier’s hat. He didn’t speak much English and as earlier established, my Russian is in the Finnish grandfather “stoi, rukiver” -level. He started the conversation by saying that Finland should be in the same empire as Russia, and then specified that Russia should be a part of Finland. In short – he turned out to be an archeologist, some sort of neo-nazi and a member of a old sect of Orthodox Christianity which attracts a lot of underground people, such as bikers. He kept going on about vikings being the lost tribe of Israel, Japanese and half of the other languages in the world having words from Viking languages in them and so on. It was a mixture of bona fide archeology and – what I think the term is in the business – crackpot theories. My mental warnings started going off after the guy started saying how certain nations should unite against the common enemy, such as muslims. In the end of the conversation he started going on about Aryan nations and how he has contacts with them if I’m interested. To make it abundantly clear, I am not and will not be, and neither will Älymystö as a band.

The evening was cut short when our taxi left for the train station. Misters Vuorensola and Haapanen went to buy us some stuff for the trip, but instead of food and water they came back with beer, cigarettes and one bar of chocolate. When we got to the train, Mr. Vuorensola needed to piss really badly, but in Russia the train toilets are locked while the train is near a city. This was of course free fun for the rest of us. We spent a couple of hours drinking the beers and chatting in the darkened sleeper car, admiring a girl across the isle who was so stunning that at least two of us paused in mid-sentence when she rose up to lift stuff to the shelves near the ceiling.

Mr. Vuorensola fell asleep sitting up and we made some room for him to sleep. When Mr. Paalanen decided to go to bed, Mr. Haapanen and I spent some time chatting with our host Gosha, who was very hyped up. This time around there was no trouble whatsoever with falling asleep.

All right, we are live on the net. You can see the Military Days festival from our webcam and audio stream is provided by Radio Ubik. The program will last from 19 to 22 Finnish time (GMT 2). We will start playing in approximately 21:00 Finnish time, maybe a bit earlier.

This day had to be experienced to be believed. It could have started better, though, since it is clear that I still can’t sleep in a train. I spent two hours trying to find a comfortable way to sleep in the train chair. When I found a position when my head stopped nodding and my neck didn’t hurt, my legs were in such an awkward position that it was painful for my knees. When I managed to correct that, I had drifted so low in the chair that my jeans tried to squeeze my testicles up my body, which was when I got up again and started from the beginning. When I finally got sleepy enough to almost fall asleep, a local guy and a travelmate across the isle started talking to a guy sitting behind me. It went on for a about twenty minutes, each whispered sibilant like fingernails on blackboard in my tired brain. When I finally asked them to shut up, I was already so irritated that I was completely alert. So, I managed to sleep an hour, perhaps two. When it was the time to get up, I was “like shot in the ass” as the Finnish proverb goes. It lasted only ten minutes, though, before I remembered that this trip is actually very fun and forgot all about sulking.

Moscow showed us its Hollywood movie version. The weather was gray, there was a lot of sleet and massive buildings hulked through the misty weather. Gosha took our equipment into the Dom Culture Center and the rest of us took the metro. The metro stations in Moscow we saw were like smoking rooms in the manor of a devout communist. Massive chandelier-like lights, mosaics of Lenin and other soviet heroes and sickles and hammers all around. The guy who said that metro stations are cathedrals of socialism hit it right on the spot.

When we reached Dom, our first project was to check out the wireless net, the geeks we are. Also, we’d have to use it tomorrow to stream the gig. Of course the net worked like a dream for all the other computers apart from the one that should be used for the webcast. I got pissed off immediately when I had to troubleshoot it, but in the end removing and reinstalling the drivers did the trick. I had looked forward to having a shower, but it wasn’t possible in the Dom. The bunch of us were a collection of greasy hair and questionable body odors, so the rest of the day promised to be disgusting.

After the geekery we went for a tour of Moscow. Our first stop was a cafe where we got some very much needed sandwiches and coffee. Trudging through the sleet we reached the Red Square, which was closed off because of the Military Days -celebration. So, no Lenin’s tomb for us. Mr. Vuorensola dropped in to buy a Juri Gagarin T-shirt from a souvenir shop, after which we went to see the rally of old communists. Here the operative word is “old”, because most of them looked like they were old age pensioners. You know, the people who lived in the soviet times and liked it, hardcore Stalinists and so on. We had to go through a security center and a metal detector to get even near the rally. Mr. Vuorensola was the only one who wasn’t admitted through at first, which was because of his bottle of vodka.

Speaking of Russian vodka, it apparently makes you see disgusting little men that sing. We alleviated our disappointment for not seeing the Lenin’s mausoleum by stopping in front of a church and opening the vodka bottle, which started making a steady and fast circuit around the group of people, getting empty far faster than in Finland. When the first round was completed, suddenly a midget clad in leather coat and a fur hat started singing Santa Lucia -hymn in a very good and loud tenor which echoed around the street. For a moment we considered asking him to accompany us on the stage, but ended up dropping the idea, which was perhaps for the best. Our second random encounter was a bunch of grandmother-age women from the communist rally. Gosha asked them to pose with us with their soviet flags and cartboard signs. One of the woman was very fervent with his ideology, we took a photo where Mr. Haapanen is waving the soviet flag (and if published, which will prevent us going to any Baltic or Eastern European tour ever, I suspect). There was a lot of heated and fast paced Russian from the grannies, the locals laughed and we didn’t understand much of what was going on.

During the day I reached the conclusion about our hosts and how they act towards us. It’s kind of passive hospitality, which means they aren’t hovering around the guests all the time, maintaining small-talk and asking if everything is ok. Instead they walk with you, chatting amongst themselves in Russian and paying the guests enough attention so they don’t get lost from the group. If you approach them with questions or try to strike up a chat about something, they talk in a friendly way, joke with you and so on. Some foreign people have said that Finnish are taciturn and withdrawn, but friendly and warm once you get to know them. Based on this experience, I could say the same exact thing about most Russians we’ve met so far, one notable exception being Gosha’s girlfriend, our main tour guide and translator in St. Petersburg, who was talkative from right in the beginning. Well, I’m pretty sure that with most of them the language barrier is a big factor.

Exhausted by walking around the city we stopped in a sort of traditional Russian cafe. Apparently in the Soviet times there used to be many, as one of the locals said, “very lo-fi cafes where you could step in to have vodka, traditional Russian snacks and meet people”. Lo-fi it was, basically a small bar without any chairs and a toilet without a cover on the water tank. We bought some kind of mutton pies which were like the lörtsy from Eastern Finland, plus some vodka that tasted like gasoline. It gave us the energy to walk back to Dom, and to wait a fucking eternity when Mr. Vuorensola and Mr. Haapanen meditated in front of the vodka shelf in a local grocery store.

Back in Dom the four of us collapsed on a loft bed they have in the club. I practically passed out into deep, dreamless sleep, only waking up occasionally when Mr. Paalanen kicked me or Mr. Haapanen tried to feed his dreads to me. After a couple of hours we were woken up by the soothing sounds of hardcore noise when people started doing their soundcheck. When I got my wits back, I spent some time getting up to speed what’s happening with the rest of the world via internet, then rigged up the laptop to handle the sound stream and webcam. The latter was pretty easy, but the sound stream was slightly more problematic, mostly because the mixer and sound tech crew didn’t really speak that much English. According to preliminary tests everything worked fine, but the real baptism by fire is of course tomorrow. There was an embarassing screw-up with the testing, since I was thinking about sending parts of the actual gigs after the regular program of Ubik ended. The trouble was that I had forgot all about the time difference of one hour in between Moscow and Finland. The club ended surprisingly early, at ten in the evening, which was the same time Ubik ceased broadcasting.

The club was two thirds full and I’d say there were at least 100, maybe 150 people. We got to see the video project I mentioned in the previous entry properly this time, and it was still so impressive that I really have to get a copy of it. Then there was an industrial/EBM band that sounded a bit like Eternal Afflict. Noises of Russia threw a really impressive set, which blew us completely away. Sitting in the front row was like being in a torrent of noise. I half expected my hair start to billow by the force of it.

This evening our hosts was this nice couple who lived in the outskirts of Moscow’s downtown, in an old and slightly run-down apartment. They had a cat, a four month old dog that was extremely cute, and one rat. I finally got to take a shower, which made me feel so much a new person I felt like I’ll have to introduce myself to people again. We spend the evening listening to music and chatting with the couple. Mr. Vuorensola ended up downing three bottles of vodka during the day. By the end of the evening he was stinking drunk in the traditional Timo-way, which means that his ambient volume rose to 80 desibels, there was a sharp increase in singing miscellaneus pieces of songs and expressing strong opinions repetitively. Ripa was the first one to hit the bed, I was a close second. In spite of the unholy noise in the next room, the exhaustion and civilian-grade vodka stupor made me fall asleep so fast and efficiently I never even heard Mr Haapanen and Vuorensola come in a couple of hours later.

The long walk and bus trip of the previous day knocked out the whole band pretty efficiently. We got up at about noon, when we were thinking of leaving to downtown. Apparently there had been some communication breakdown, since our hosts were nowhere to be seen. We basically lazed around for a couple of hours, until the actual inhabitant of the apartment woke up and made us some green tea and porridge for breakfast. The clock was closing on three and we were just about to go out and get some lunch, when Gosha’s girlfriend arrived from the university to show us around the downtown.

The schedule was tight, so we decided to only go out to eat. Mr. Paalanen and I had decided to go and have some local food, such as shaslikis and blinis. We happened to run into an Uzbek restaurant, which was a jackpot. I had some horsemeat-noodle soup and quails filled with mutton, the others had their own soup, big-ass shashiliks and so on. Our dessert was the traditional Uzbek Irish Coffee. Originally we wanted just cups of coffee, but when the waiter started listing what they had and said “traditional”, we thought it was some Uzbek thing. In reality it was a brand name, an Irish Coffee of sorts, with half the coffee and double the cream and alcohol. While eating we talked with our guide, who turned out to be a lawyer/dancer, a pretty interesting combination. Apparently in Russia making a living is really hard for artists, so most of them have two jobs like that.

After a quick visit to a local booze store we went back to the apartment to load our stuff into a bus we were told would take us to the gig place. It turned out that the bus guy couldn’t make it, so we ended up doing the transportation in the way no Finnish people would ever think of doing it – we hailed down two cars from the traffic, the local hosts haggled a price and off we went. Timo, the guy whose apartment we lived in and I ended up getting an old Lada, whose shock absorbers creaked and steering wheel squeaked in every turn. The funny thing is that the car took us right where we wanted and getting a transportation like that was much, much faster than getting a cab in Helsinki. Apparently a whole lot of people who have a car make some extra money by being a freelance taxi. It’t not exactly legal, but no-one cares.

The club where we played wasn’t really officially open until the coming Saturday, but they arranged gigs nevertheless. It was a very large place, which could fit in hundreds of people. We had some irritating techical problems with our mixer board, and when we were doing our soundcheck, we were filmed for some TV-show or something. For some reason that gave me a twinge of stage fright, since in my ears our soundcheck songs were as far from the zone as you can get, and Ripa and I had to start the gig with an improvisation.

The gigs before us were very interesting. The first was actually a piece of video art, with a movie cut from old war movies with a noise-score made out of war sounds in the background. It was brutal and strong, the only bad thing was that the video projector kept fucking up the picture. It would be interesting to see it with better equipment. Gosha’s set was more noise with bullet sounds and a human figure wrapped in white cloth or plastic squirming on the stage, with a blinkin light on her forehead. We missed most of it because we were getting ready for our gig.

The gig ended up going well. The technics in the gig place were really surprisingly good, I could hear all the distinct intstruments, there was no feedback, no jumps in the volume, not one of the usual irritations. Afterwards some people came to talk to me and Mr. Vuorensola, while the rest of the band was selling our cds.

The converation was cut short when we got the word that we should start carrying stuff downstairs. The owner of the bar, a middle-aged largish guy was singing an energetic rock-song on the stage, the song and the appearance of the short-haired, middle-aged guy dressed in gray sweater made an interesting paradox. There was no bus, but we got packed into two taxis instead. The situation was a bit chaotic, but it seems that the main theme of the trip is not really understanding what’s going on and what’s the situation, but things working out nevertheless extremely smoothly. When we reached the train station, Mr. Vuorensola was already working through his bottle of vodka. We waited for the hosts for some time, during which Mr. Paalanen got us some food. Finally we were escorted into the night trains, which were like straight from some movie. They were painted in several colours and they had emblems and logos on them, plus of course the train guards with the large soviet-military style caps.

I’m writing this in the train, which is flowing smoothly through the dark Russian countryside. A couple of guys from the local bands are chatting around us, and for once I’m sort of grateful for the language barrier we have – right now I’m too tired to be very social. I’m in a very good mood, though, and waiting with enthusiasm what tomorrow will bring. What I hope for this night is a few hours of at least halfway decent sleep. Never been one to sleep very well in trains or busses, so it remains to be seen. At least we don’t have a gig tomorrow.

Our trip started on Tuesday morning, when all of us met in front of Lasipalatsi in Helsinki. Mr. Vuorensola arrived from a movie project related meeting, Mr. Haapanen and I dropped in by a taxi. Finding the St. Petersburg busses was easy, since Ilmari spotted them when going to get keys to his apartment, from which he got locked out in the previous night. When we started trudging towards the busses, loaded like camels with our band stuff, a blond woman with a sign for St. Petersburgh caught us and led us to a slightly run down bus. The situation was a bit weird, since neither the woman nor the bus driver spoke a word of Finnish or English, and in between us we knew about ten words of Russian. Our first piece of local colour was a big and very drunk Russian man who attached himself to Mrrs. Haapanen and Vuorensola, showed them his fists and told how he’s a boxing champion and a police.

The trip itself was pretty uneventful, but it took a lot longer than we anticipated. The reason
for that was the bus stopping on every goddamn supermarket, once dropping people to one and then driving back to visit another. In spite of that the ten hours in the bus went surprisingly fast. The border was a bit of a hassle, since in the Finnish side the first two officials didn’t have any idea about the arrival forms which we were told to get, and the third one realised that it’s something you have to do in the Russian side of the border. In there we had to fill out five forms with the texts in Russian, using only one pen and being dragged off one by one by the beautiful but less than friendly female customs official.

We finally arrived to St. Petersburg downtown half a hour late from our estimate. We unpacked our stuff and uncharacteristacally I almost forgot the laptop we need for streaming the gig in the bus. Or I actually did forget it, but someone from the bus brought the bag to me. Our hosts arrived, gave us a small bottle of booze which we emptied there right on the spot, before even touching the band stuff on the ground. The next step was to follow the hosts to a small restaurant, where we had a late dinner of borsch soup and several different kinds of dishes from a buffet. During the day we had eaten only a sandwich and a half per person, so stepping into a restaurant with the smell of food in the air made the drool flow freely. I did a sort of “one of everything that has meat in it” -kind of order, which turned out to be quite filling.

Next we were led to the apartment where we were staying for the night. First we entered through a low archway with very industrial looking pipes and cables, then slipped in through a backdoor to a very dilapidated staircase, with paint peeling from the walls, crumbling concrete and the smell of sewer and mildew. After climbing up several floors we were ushered in to an apartment, which was deemed the coolest and coziest any of us had ever seen. It was one of those old, high apartments, which had been converted into a series of small rooms and corridors. The apartment was decorated beautifully, there were a lot of CD and movie shelves on the walls, plants on the windowsills all kinds of interesting items and equipment lying around, plus everything was very neat. The apartment is apparently some kind of commune with only a few fixed inhabitants, the rest changing now and then. We were given some tea which we drank from small bowls and shots of the Salmiakki-vodka we brought as gifts to the hosts.

The food, tea and booze gave us enough energy to go to a sightseeing trip, in spite of the time being after midnight. The trip ended up being quite long, but interesting. Our main host Gosha spoke only little English, but his girlfriend acted as a translator and a travel guide, telling us about the buildings and areas we walked past. Mr. Paalanen and I made a decision to come to St. Petersburg for a cultural trip with more time. As an interesting note, when we reached the Mars Square with the flame that’s burning in memory of dead soldiers, there were some police warming their hands around it. Mr. Paalanen, the master of passports, had left his papers in our hosts’ apartment. The police noticed us coming near and perked up, asking in Russian for us to leave. The reason is the Military Day, when they’ll be expecting some demonstrations from communists, fascists and so on, and apparently they are a bit fidgety about stuff relating to terrorism.

When I’m writing this, it’s about half past three in the Tuesday morning and it’s time to get to bed. I called the dibs on the only actual bed in the room, the rest of the guys are sleeping on the floor over some blankets, side by side. All in all, this tour has started really well.