das gelbe vom ei

to keep anyone interested up to date, there are some mp3's here to listen to. progress is still slow with the new stuff; we played force field pt.2 at kuudes linja and immediately regretted it. however, this seems to be one of the necessary steps to be taken when writing something new. for us at least.

what we usually do when we're attempting to write a pop song (in four easy steps):

1. spend months playing nonsense, sixteen parts or something, then start to cut down, reel in the good, and argue amongst ourselves about which part was good etc.

2. spend many more weeks working on what you now have left, disagree with people about silly things like "nine chords in that progression is too much!" "well three isn't enough!". which is just shit

3. suddenly notice that everyone is getting tired of the new stuff and would rather work on new new stuff, which is basically going back to step one, before reading step 4.

4. at some point the something we've spent since august tackling is starting to sound like a proper song that still needs vocals. from here on it gets easier, usually someone has an idea of what the song might end up sounding like by now and we tend to go with that.

so here are some of the fruits of our labour:
AA-051206-1
AA-051206-3
AA-121206-1 (for Sheffield)

we're going to do something at a studio in the first week of january and the plan is to record 'this just won't do' and a second song, to be released later on in the spring of 2007.

kuudes linja poster in progress

orange,red & black ink on paper, colours inverted. this is for the show at kuudes linja on the 22nd of november.

the wheat and barley in the hem-of-your-skirt

lighten up, roy. we finally have a name now, 'athletic arms' is something that seems to be ironic and ambiguous enough for our purposes. we might have a gig coming up at the end of the month, apparently 90% certain.. 'force field' seems to be ready now in form, the only thing left to do is emily's vocal; 'death suit' seems to be going in a rather odd direction as of wednesday, leaning away from lumbering, teetering on the brink of fast music. still fairly big in it's way, which is always nice. something to empty stadiums with, or even small rooms if it turns out right. the general consensus at the moment seems to be that we should drop the title 'turned' out of the whole deal, these new songs work well played in a row, but at the same time they function perfectly well on their own too. so all is well now, things are looking up to an extent and there are some plans of recording something in january that we can give a proper release.

p.s. i will try to leave out the nonsense of previous posts in future. planning the future outlook of stuff is alright if i'm the only one that comes here, but i think it's time to put up some links to this blog soon. a redesign of the ole' website is on it's way too, if i ever manage to tackle php.

continental drift, you madam, you made me shift; and now all the ladies are staring at my balls in the bearing.

i have about 120 minutes of material for just the first two parts of turned in various formats, c-tape and minidisc mainly. fucking destructive to the soul, all this building and building without knowing how far to take it, where to stop, who to build it with. i get frustrated when things don't progress - and at the same time we have all these little pieces of shitty pop-music floating about. everything about this is in a continuous state of flux, and to fully understand it, i think i need it to stop for a while. or at least slow down. so, stop writing to get rid of the anxiety you feel when you stop writing. it makes no sense.

if there was an easy way around this, i think i just might take it. BUT there is not, the fact is that we have a badly airconditioned little room with drums, drunks and amplifiers in it and an unknown amount of people come by to play there a couple times a week. this should work just as simply as it sounds. it doesn't though, and i don't understand that. there are all these bits i mentioned earlier parrallel things making noise that i need to write down now: forcefield int. BASSDRUM AC.GUITAR (F) VIOLINS (one on accents, another not) VLTONE (AC) ext1. (Am) AC.GUITAR has some chords here, Am Gm F A A# (for a chorus) and Am F Dm F etc. violins do hungarian shit shit shit. BASS and VLTONE are dating now, they share everything, especially E/A C/C E/A F/C or something. keyboard of the 80s leads. did i mention TRUMPET was here all along. ext2. (Em) is glued on top of ext1, this is to help me remember. BASS is still friends with VLTONE in background although the thrill has subsided now and VLTONE never opens doors and probably sleeps around. the verse goes /E C /EC F /E C /EC F /FG /GA /AF:and then it starts again. there is an ELECTTRIC GUITAR here: C / C / C / C / Em Dm / C'' F :and that repeats too. then theres a big chorus that is very beautiful that you would like or so i'd like to imagine, and there is a part with a repetitious metallophone that sings AHC over and over, then the BASS stops and starts after some drums have been played and then it goes very dreamy but the kind of dreams with feedback from maltreated guitarspeakers would be like this perhaps, although there is no guarantee, and you can't have it back in two weeks, or ever for that matter, the true cause for concern here is more in the concept than the product. we have no name. would you feel like talking to people if they didn't know what to call you and you couldn't tell them? one of the new songs will have the new name, and that baby will grow. and there will be lots of different songs, the amount of parts and parents to them we have is ludicrous and putting 9 different parts in one song may be too much.

so we cut down and cut the songs up and spread the whole thing around before bringing it back together later, alterations will be made forever. luckily, what we do have here is the capacity for change. at any point, we can go off and write slavic traditional folk. and why not? we already did, and it's played on the accordion by the way. still. if we could never change, never ever do anything differently, we'd be worse off than the saddest man in the whole world; dweezil zappa, cursed at birth, doomed to eat pancakes with lisa loeb for all eternity. terrifyingly, amen.

force field takes form, and others

we recorded a first draft of the very beginning and the end of 'force field', part one in the turned series.. the song is slowly beginning to take shape, and will possibly last up to fifteen minutes in length when we're finished with it. the other song here is a first attempt at writing part five in the series, 'meters are miles'. again, only the beginning and the end got recorded, but perhaps that will be enough for now.

tuesday was spent working on 'death suit', the insanely stupidly big lumbering epic five-part thing. at least the violin-players are getting something a little bit more challengeing to work with - think bach, with drums and feedback. and an inevitable metallophone. will post an mp3 of that too when i get a chance, and try to fix the below; the sound-quality is terrible.

1. force field - intro, verse
2. force field - ending
3. meters are miles - verse and end

meters are miles

the battle to finish writing the turned series rages on. we spent sunday concentrating on force field again, the keychanges need some hard work on them and coming up with a second theme seems to be quite troublesome. jere played us an extremely beautiful piece he wrote for guitar, and we will most likely use it as it's own seperate song. so basically this is all multiplying, and four parts won't be enough.. i had a dream during saturday night in which i heard most of these parts played in a row. some bits were missing, some i just didn't remember and the rest are fading fast. i managed to write down most of what there was soon after i woke up, and the followng is from the notebook i used (slightly revised in light of the rehearsal that followed, and including ideas i've worked on with tuukka and by myself afterwards):

1/4 - force field, beginning to take shape slowly, will probably involve words with a sort of agricultural feel to them, a slowly building piece with a loud noise burst after the intro, then gradually turning more and more atonal. the parts for this in their correct order (at the moment) is:
intro: about two minutes of seemingly unplanned accents on floor tom, accordion and line 6 looper, using snippets of violin and metallophone all slowed down, with violins playing short bits of the first theme
loud part: comes in suddenly and subsides just as fast, guitars and drums (possibly two sets) have the lead here.
cymbal swell: a one-bar expanse on the first note of the first theme's bass (e)
theme 1/1: bass and a repetetive 5/4 metallophone, violins and drums slowly enter, imitating the 5/4 rhythm
theme 2/1: bass and metallophone continue, strings and trumpet veer off into the main theme, very quietly
middle eight: where trumpet and second metallophone/guitar take the lead for 8 bars. a sort of solo if you like.
theme 2: a lengthy chorus-ish part where the violins start on a hypnotic four note loop.
theme 3/1: bass, metallophone, strings and trumpet return, this time with added guitars and piano.
modulation: slowly pulling everything from an Am-key to Bb.
end: partly borrowing the end of the world or theme 2/4 from death suit.

2/4 - crocodile teeth:
verse: violins play the original keyboard line pizzicato, emily sings.
chorus: drums and accordion enter, and everything gets scrambled by a delay-pedal.

3/4 - death suit, starting to look very big, loud, epic and looming:
theme 1/1: one bar in 4/4 time followed by 8 bars in 3/4.
theme 1/2: or tangerine dream. violins play a two-part theme over and over, modulating between f and g# throughout. quietly.
theme 2/2: the same as above, only twice slower this time.
theme 1/3: also called donnie darko, the lead instruments are two metallophones.
theme 2/3: again, the same repeated, but with the higher-pitched vibes playing twice the normal speed.
theme 1/4: aka best of bach, strings and trumpet lead and the bass changes key over and over, always returning where it started from by the end of the cycle.
theme 2/4: end of the world, same as 1/4 but with the bass veering off into another direction and one of the violins playing a repetetive short arpeggio.
theme 1/2: back again, this time much louder.
theme 2/2: again, the slowed down version.
theme 3/2: still slowed down, but with a much simpler bass.
theme 2/1: and we're back at the beginning, this time with strings playing the first four beats of the rubato from left your marks in the sand over the 4/4 part.

4/4 - left your marks in the sand
intro: 4/4 rhythm, with double-bass and drums.
rubato 1: emily and iina sing and play a short vocal/trumpet bit here, regardless of rhythm.
verse: everything from here on is piano-led, apart from the very end.
chorus 1: understated and quiet, hinting at the second chorus.
verse 2: second verse differs only in having more trumpet, sax and clarinet.
chorus 2: strings enter here.
middle eight
vocal bridge
instrumental bridge
ending: return of the drums (and vocals).
rubato 2

5/4 - mox kow / end fights will probably be jere playing a compostion he wrote for classical guitar with added strings, trumpet and metallophone.

6/4 - meters are miles will be the ballad. and the only one we haven't really started proper work on. the ending will have the adjacent 1/4 notes though, i promise.

prince sings on, like some mollusc in your head

yesterday's rehearsal was spent working on force field, a seemingly futile attempt to merge several unfinished parts for the song together - i'm having some second thoughts about the addition of the main piano line from moscow being used in the beginning of this first part. the notes don't seem to correspond in any sensible way and the metallophone just doesn't have the range that it requires to sound good. tuukka spent a good long time introducing a new fourth part for the song, a nice bridge that he managed to work out for violins and trumpet with essi, saara and iina. the rest of the day seemed to be a bit of a waste, everybody sitting with their instruments, not entirely sure what they should be doing.

it did occur to me that a piano part that tuukka jammed on for some time during the time we were recording the grand piano parts for left your marks in the sand last winter could be used as the first part of death suit somehow. the part sounds quite powerful as it is (but only if you use a grand or upright piano to play it), starting with one bar in 4/4 rhythm followed by eight bars in 3/4, after which it starts again from the beginning. this may sound interesting if it gradually blended in with the second part, tangerine dream.

i'm listening to three records on heavy rotation at the moment: september 000 by secret machines, 7 from the village by fields and trans canada highway by boards of canada. i'm reading kafka on the shore by haruki murakami and have recently seen my neighbor totoro by hayao miyazaki at the 19th annual helsinki international film festival. i have tickets to colour me kubrick by brian w. cook, art school confidential by terry zwigoff and tideland by terry gilliam. should be good.

p.s.
going through the four minidiscs i had with me today i discovered an extremely old version of aircrash - before we thought of using faster drums.. anyway, the link is below. emily and i sing, jere plays guitar and otto plays drums. recorded way back in 2001.

aircrash at folkpensionsanstalten

i found: recordings of sinking steamboats, hush and haunted planes/moss-school

i've been going through some old md-cassettes, discovering alternate versions of many older songs played at rehearsal rooms in laajasalo and kerava - a new way to play the second half of sinking steamboats (an addition rather than a completely new take on the song), an extremely old version of hush that seems to have a certain something that the recent version lacks - work on this song seems to be constant, as we decided to replace most of my guitar-parts with violins, and the lyrics have been changing forever.. and finally, a recorded version of the fourth part in the turned series, tentatively moscow. by no means what the song will sound like finished, it gives a fair idea of what the piano and guitar might sound like together some day. these recordings of hush and moscow seem to be from late 2001, the first committed to minidisc in the front room of a house in laajasalo and the second at our first rehearsal room in laajasalo. hush has jere on guitar, otto on bass, ville on drums and myself on guitar and doing the vocal parts, moscow is otto on piano, jere on guitar and me on my usual vocal and acoustic guitar duties.

sinking steamboats a and b.
early version of mox kow.

crocodile teeth is one of the shortest songs in our roster, but i feel the lyrics are our most accomplished. the picture above is a recent drawing of our bass-player kelanen by our drummer & resident art-school student tuukka. due to continuous arguments and stupid fights while in studio around last christmas, kelanen left the band, and emily and i wrote the crocodile teeth lyric based around him and his penchant for arnold schwarzenegger impressions:

"lines are strewn across
marshes eye and pot-holes
like across your crooked stance
like across candid demands
you were our mountain of man
caricatures built in sand
a bad actor with a speech-impediment
poorly mouthed and forced in sentiment

i can't remember, much else of you"

force field, death suit, marks in the sand, moss-school

as a first entry, coming up with anything sensible to say seems beyond me. i will try to keep this all updated as best i can during the time that this group is on a break from playing live-shows; this is here for anyone to find. to recap, we don't have a real name, we have played twenty shows. there are ten of us, we play all our own songs - some of which have been the same since the day we wrote them, some of them still changing.

our most recent project has been to start work on a four-part piece called turned. the third part has been ready for a long time and we must have played it to an audience nearly a dozen times by now. the whole idea is to use classical-music influences to an extreme where they become the main point of focus, leaving the rock elements in the background. the following is a sort of open plan for the four turned pieces - and a catalogue of the parts we have composed by name. don't expect any of it to make sense please..

turned 1/4 - force field. the three parts we have ready for this piece are quite similar to one another. the beginning will be very minimalistic and seemingly arryhthmical, violin notes on floor-tom accents, slowly bringing out melody from within the interleaved hum. part two of this will make it's entrance forcefully, a storm of squalling feedback and both violins playing the full leading melody - backed up by trumpet and a possible accordion. as quickly as this part appears, it quickly subsides, giving way to the leading melody played with guitars, metallophones, piano and strings. all of it ending in a lush minor 7 chord.

turned 2/4 - death suit. this is slowly beginning to take shape; we've managed to complete four parts for the piece (and more are on the way) - the first is called 'donnie darko' as it reminded someone of the score for that film, second comes 'tangerine dream' - off-kilter arpeggios on violins, modulating every two bars; 'tangerine dream' and 'donnie darko' may both end up using the same guitar riff in the background, one that makes me think of godspeed you! black emperor everytime i hear it. third comes 'best of bach', another strings & trumpet arrangement, the most honest pop melody in all the four parts and is naturally followed by the fourth section called 'end of the world'. there will be more to say about this one once we get it near finished. a fifth part has been kicking around that sounds like dub. but we might just end up leaving that out - however much fun it is to play.

turned 3/4 - left your marks in the sand. the long-finished third part starts with a jazzy 4/4 rhythm with trumpet and saxophone playing over a simple four-note bassline. this gives way to a short vocal and trumpet centered rubato, and continues in 3/4 rhythm for the rest of the song. violins and 'cello make an appearance during the second chorus and round the whole song off in a slow-building but powerful final crescendo.

turned 4/4 - moss-school. the closing fourth chapter will be a very simple ballad using an acoustic guitar and a piano as the leading instruments. the piano melody will be revisited here in full for the first time, after appearing in tiny fragments played on the violin during the first third of force field and as the backbone to the final bridge in left your marks in the sand. here it comes through in the chorus in all it's glory, backed up by violins, 'cello, trumpet and orchestral percussion. the very end of the song will involve all instruments dropping down into parallel 1/4 notes, creating a very unsettling dischord.