What a great few days in UK with Dave Stapleton‘s new project “Flight”. Great venues, great music, great people..Here are some pictures from the road.

Our first gig was in Bristol, St George’s. I’ve played there twice before, once with Ilmiliekki Quartet and once with Tomasz Stanko and I really love the place. It works beautifully with or without amplification, and this time we enjoyed playing totally acoustic. I dont’ think I enjoy anything as much as playing without amplification in a good venue like this. Here’s also one nice review from the gig.

Felt good to be back (St George’s, Bristol)!

Beautiul! With Dave Stapleton, Marius Neset, Dave Kane and Brodowski String Quartet.

The next day we traveled to Wales (my first time!), where we played in an another great venue, Dora Stoutzker Hall. We also had a chance to have a little workshop for the local students, which was a lot of fun. The concert was recorded by BBC’s Jazz on Radio 3 (broadcasted on 21st of May!).

Workshop in Cardiff..

Our final gig was in London (King’s Place). By this time we really felt the music was totally relaxed and really flowing in a nice way. As in most cases, also this time we recorded the album first and only now got to play gigs together. It kind of makes one wonder how the music on the album would have sounded with some more playing before, but on the other hand there’s a certain kind of magic in going to the studio and playing the songs (almost) for the first time in the moment of recording.. In any case, I really like the result, and it has been received very well by Guardian, The Independent, AllAboutJazz etc..

Doing a sound check at King’s Place, London (with Marius Neset, Dave Kane and Dave Stapleton)

Well, that’s about it. Next week gigs in Norway with Mats Eilertsen’s Sky Dive! Will keep you posted.

Love,

O

I’ve been dreaming about working more and more as a composer (together as being a drummer) for a long time, and for that the past year has been very encouraging. In addition of finishing the new song for Jyväskylä Big Band, I’ve done quite a lot of composing for Oddarrang and other bands where I play, and also started working with my coming solo album. On top of all that I’ve also done some film music. At the moment I’m about to finish a work for a documentary by Sanni Priha, and in coming weeks I’ll start a very exciting project for a polish movie “How Deep Is The Ocean” by Filip Syczynski. It’s going to be so much fun!

Right now, after being so happy about the weekend spend in Jyväskylä, I’m seriously thinking about taking my next step further as a composer. One of my “themes” for this spring will be studying more and more different composers, composing techniques and listening to lots of music. Maybe one day I’ll make one of my biggest dreams come true, and write something for a symphony orchestra..

Till then (and hopefully before)!

Love,

O

Many people have been asking about the process of making Oddarrang’s latest album Cathedral, so I thought about giving a small explanation of each of the songs in the album. The album was recorded in June 2009 at Finnvox studios, Helsinki, with a great sound engineer Mikko Raita.

1. Prayer
The principal idea for this song is a constant morse code singing in the back almost through the whole song (the working title was Morse, naturally..). Many people have been asking what the message is, and some have tried to “break it”, but since it’s quite heavily processed and also edited, it seems to be difficult. For a long time I thought I’d keep the message as a secret, but I’ll let you know. The message is “Love, beauty, eternity. Life is a miracle”.
As the name of the song suggests, it’s kind of a chant, a prayer before the journey, so it works great as an intro for the whole album.

2. The Step
This could be the first step in this world of ours that is full of beauty and love, but at the same time full of dangerous creatures hiding in the darkness. This was the first song where I definitely wanted Lasse to play electric bass instead of acoustic. Nowadays he hardly ever uses acoustic with this band.

3. Canon
This song was one of the first new songs I made after the release of Music Illustrated. It has an element of the earlier, more acoustic sound of Oddarrang. I recorded quite a few tracks with my old synths (especially Roland JX-3P) at home, but decided to mix them very low in the final version.

4. Arcane Light
We played this song many years with a working title Inside-Outside. For a long time I had an idea of this tune as the opening track for the album, but decided to change plans at the last minute. The version on the album was the second take and recorded live as it is.

5. Frames
This song concists of two different parts that are connected with a drum/percussion part. We recorded everything live, but in this song you can hear a change of the drum set in the middle of the song. I had two drum sets in the studio, so when the percussive part started, I simply left my “first” drum set, walked to the other set and recorded the rest of the song with that. You can actually hear a long break before that part (that’s about the time it took me to walk to the other set!). I also did some post production at home. I used some African drums to make the rhythms of the intro more strong. I also recorded a little bit of my wooden working table and other percussive stuff to make the percussion part a bit stronger.

6. Psalm No. 3
This is in a way a second part for the song Prayer. Also this song has a strong religious feel in the title, and the mood of the whole song is quite serene. At this point I would like to point out that despite having strong religious and even christian connotations, that is not how I want this album to be thought of. Surely it’s very spiritual, but I have approached everything in a very wide spiritual way, not through any special religion.
This song also contains couple of tracks of my JX-3P.

7. Funeral
This song is composed by Osmo Ikonen. He made this song long before we started to play it with Oddarrang and it was quite different in the beginning. The idea of using a church organ in the intro came quite late, but that became one of the main characters of the song and an important part of the album. We recorded the organ at Sibelius Academy’s organ room using only one stereo pair of AKG 414′s. One funny thing came up later, when we started to mix the song. When recording the song, we used an intro that was done with a MIDI organ since the original organ wasn’t recorded yet. At the moment of mixing we suddenly noticed that the key of the real church organ was half note higher from the MIDI version! It made the transition (where the band joins in) sound extremely weird. It turned out that even though Osmo had played the intro from the right key, the organ had been tuned half note higher than any normal keyboard. For a while we thought we’d have to do the whole thing again, but luckily Mikko (Raita) found out a way to re-pitch the organ without destroying the sound. Handy!

8. Holy Mountain
This song is composed by our bassist Lasse Lindgren. Holy Mountain was also a strong candidate for the title of the album. All the synths Lasse recorded where originally just a demo he did by himself to try different sounds, but when we were having the post production session where we were supposed to record the synths, we realized that all the tracks from the first demo were so good that we decided to use them as they were. We saved a lot of time!

9. In Oamok
I came up with this place Oamok in a beautiful French documentary La marche de l’empereur (March of the Penguins). Oamok is the place where male penguins are taking care of the eggs and waiting for the females to bring food in an extremely difficult wheather conditions in Antarctica. Anyway in this song Oamok can mean anything..maybe it’s a place where people go when they leave their bodies and are in transition to some unknown place..

So that’s about it! I really enjoyed making this album, even though it took much longer than what I originally expected. Hopefully next one will be done before 2015..

Love,

O