The RPM Challenge completed in plenty of time

Today it is finally ready - my RPM Challenge 2009 album named To Escape a Bellowing Ocean, To Escape a Forlorn Sky. It is mostly a postrock and triphop album featuring krautrockish hypnotic repetition, ambient atmospheres, changing signatures and big dynamic changes. More information coming later.

You can listen to this album at last.fm or download it from scene.org.

RPM Day 18: Missing Only Five Minutes!

Whoa! Lately I've been busy writing songs instead of blog entries. The RPM Challenge is progressing well: I have about 30 minutes of material waiting for the final touches and mixing.

I started the challenge with a project name Stranger At The Dinner. I picked a fresh name for this project because I didn't want to restrict myself mentally to anything I have done before... But I found myself writing postrock pieces again, so I renamed the project back to Trailing Space, which is my "real" postrock project.

The album will have quite a lot of contrasts: Quiet little piano and string compositions, buzzing doom metal, slow triphop moments, atonal ambient soundscapes and big dynamic changes. Everything still seems to fit together and the tracks form a story, although there is no vocals.

I am not going to post preview mixes or cover graphics now, but I tease you with the song names. These are the songs I have written during this February:

1. Gazing Solemnly At The Ever Dimming Horizon
   
2. The Awakening
   
3. Like Burning Cities Painting a Crimson Sky
4. 1565 Lemaitre
5. Everlasting Punishment, Everyone Welcome
6. All Solace Be Buried

These songs will end to the RPM release. I will make also an "official" Internet release later, which will also include older unreleased material, like Every Heart Will Be Attacked, Kill Your Darlings and And The Rockets Dead Glare. Those are tracks I have written for theater performances.

RPM Challenge Day 03: Gazing Solemnly At The Ever Dimming Horizon

Whoa! The first song ready for The RPM Challenge 2009! Well, it is not 100% ready. It still needs some fixing and mixing (I haven't even listened to it with proper studio monitors). The beginning of the song is an instrumental postrock song similiar to my earlier Trailing Space works, but all of a sudden it changes the time signature and turns into a repetitive, hypnotic one chord krautmetal mayhem spiced up with King Crimson-esque tritonus layers. The name of the song, Gazing Solemnly At The Ever Dimming Horizon, is a reference to probably the best net comic called Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

RPM Challenge Progress-o-Meter: 9 minutes done. 26 minutes left.

You can download the preview version from here.

RPM Challenge Day 01: Post-Rock Guitars And Shamanic Latencies

It is the 1st day of February and the first day of The RPM Challenge (record an album in 28 days)! Nice to start the challenge in Sunday when you have nothing else going on. I started my day with a cup of black coffee and an electronic, distorted beat layered with atmospheric electric pianos. When I began to add some guitars here and there, I found something just wasn't right and I couldn't improve the song any further. I closed the project file and restarted.

It was a good choice. Soon I was composing and recording a little Mogwai-like guitars with different variations. At the moment the song is a slow and straight forward post-rock track, but I want to record at least an epic climax finalé to it...

I had invited my friend Petri to join the recording session and he came by. We had an idea to record some percussions, but not to the song I started earlier the day. We encountered strange latency problems when recording his arsenal, which consisted of a djembe, congas, shakers and all kind of clave percussions. I didn't find the cause of the problems, but we found a work-around.

We started by recording a little faster rhythms, but soon we found ourselves recording quite slow rumba columbia rhythm. When I started to play a low, distorted and heavily delayed guitar on it the direction of the song started to unfold; Sort of muddy, shamanic folk rock psychedelia or something, something very new for me.

Now I have hundreds of megabytes fresh material on my laptop, but no good preview material to show. Tomorrow I will start working hard with those two sketches. We have also ideas for new songs... February looks like promising!

Ilkka Hänninen - Soundscapes For The Stages

I have made music for numerous theatrical performances. Usually I use some old tracks, sometimes remix them, but of course I always compose some new material. I have selected five tracks originally composed for two performances to form an ambient compilation named Soundscapes For The Stages. All of these tracks are improvised live performances played in my home studio with softsynths and keyboard.

In year 2006 Elina Väänänen was directing a version of Shakespeare's The Tempest and she was in need for ambient. Lots of my earlier ambient tracks were used (available at scene.org), but I also composed five new pieces. One of the tracks was never used and another one (Principia Etchica) has been already released in Trailing Space's album Like Saturn Devours His Own Children. The rest three pieces are on this compilation and they are called Cezannen kuvat, Derridan metodologia and Sulava aika. The names of the songs have nothing to do with the play itself.

Next year Väänänen was continuing with Shakespeare. This time she was making a sci-fi version of Richard III. She asked me if she could use again my music and I ended up to compose two new tracks, simply named Rikhard I and Rikhard II.

1. Cezannen kuvat (4:50)
   
2. Derridan metodologia (4:16)
   
3. Sulava aika (7:13)
   
4. Rikhard I (20:53)
   
5. Rikhard II (9:22)
   

So, what are you waiting for? Listen to it online at last.fm!

Solar Satan EP Out Now For Free

Whew. I have finally mixed and released the new Solar Satan EP. It is named as The Colorful Album and it contains four tracks of northern psychedelic krautrock/NWOFHM action. I recorded the fourth track Searching For Colors Outside The Biblical Scope just yesterday and the rest three tracks have been previewed in this blog previously.

Listen to it at last.fm

Tracklist:

1. The World Blossoms Into Thousands of Colors
2. Searching For Colors Outside The Biblical Scope
3. Beelzebub Approve The Cezanne's Usage of Colors
4. Spawning Multicolor Universe
   

Solar Satan - Beelzebub Approves The Cezanne's Usage of Colors

Here's the new Solar Satan track as I promised yesterday: Beelzebub Approves The Cezanne's Usage of Colors. As previous Solar Satan songs, this piece also trusts to the power of playing the same riff all over again and again. The image above is, by the way, concept art of the incoming EP. Because so many bands are having their black, red, blue or whatever color album I decided I want my own too - The Colorful Album.

The RPM Challenge 2009

The RPM Challenge for this year is open. It is a challenge for bands and artists where the goal is to record an album in 28 days. An album is defined here as either 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material and the material must be recorded during February.

The idea is to get musicians activated: No waiting for inspiration. Instead, taking action puts one in a position to get inspired. Artists will stumble across ideas they would have never come up with otherwise, and maybe only because they were trying to meet a day’s quota of (song)writing.

I took the challenge two years ago, but I failed badly by not writing anything. Bad me! Next year I skipped the challenge, but at the moment I am so full of inspiration and energy that there is no reason to not participate. If my muses have left me at the gates of February I have at least something kicking me further.

I have yet another project name for this challenge (I didn't want to use any existing one, because it would force me too much to any direction): Strangers At The Dinner. I don't know what kind of music I will make. Maybe post-rock, emo, electro, ambient, shit music or humppa punk.

BTW: Solar Satan EP is progressing. I recorded new stuff today! It's a little heavier stuff. I will put it online tomorrow!

Free Amazing Reverberation Simulator epicVerb Out

An amazing reverberation simulator named epicVerb (PC VST) has been released under freeware licence. It aims at tight small room and ambience effect simulation (well suited to modern drum and vocal productions) as well as for the large hall sounds. It is designed for maximum flexibility and usability and to take place as a true high quality stereo main reverb.

I love the sound of this plugin. It is not muddy at all with source signal with a wide spectrum and the output sounds natural and relaxed. The amount of typical reverb artifacts is surprisingly low! And did I make it clear yet: It's free!

More information here. You can download the plugin from here.

Two New Psychedelic New Rave Krautrock NWOFHM Tracks

I planned to make some atmospheric, epic and blah blah post-rock during holiday season and I failed radically. Instead I started another new project named Solar Satan. At the moment the target is to make psychedelic NWOFHM influenced dance music with emphasis on grooving rhythms. I'm also trying to play guitar here and to be honest, I am not very good at it. To hell with that!

When I have 2-3 tracks more, I will make an official MP3 release somewhere in the internets (I mean a netlabel, not just my blog). These are not the final mixes, but will give you an example what I have been doing all these days (actually I've been drinking beer and playing World of Goo, Civilization 4 and Guitar Hero III).

The first track is called Spawning Multicolor Universe. When I started to compose this track, Atlas by Battle was playing in my head and I had an idea of making a math rock tune. That song inspired the rhythm section quite a lot. But as usual my songs start to live their own life and the track started to sound more and more something else...

The second song is The World Blossoms Into Thousands of Colors (see a color theme forming here) is more Circle influenced. The first few seconds of the song I wrote was mostly simple distorted guitar bashing, but when I mixed the guitars a little lower the song found its softer side.

You can download the tracks from here and here.

Spotify - Free Music Streaming

One of the most promising music services today comes from Sweden and it is called Spotify. I have been using it for about two weeks since I received an invitation from Antti at Monoliitti. Spotify is a music streaming service and at the moment the music selection is quite large. Spotify uses its own client application (available for Windows and OS X, Windows version should work in Linux with Wine), which is easy to use, fast and solid as rock. The best thing is that the service is free as it is funded by advertisements.

Bad thing is that because Spotify is in beta testing phase the free accounts are limited: You need an invitation to create one.

Luckily, I found the service so nice that I wanted to support it and subscribed to a premium account, which costs 9,99€ a month (less than 14 USD). As a premium subscriber I have received some invitations and I have some spare ones left. As a Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever present to my readers, I will send invitations to the first two people commenting to this post (don't forget to write your real email address in the message part in form like your(dot)name(at)gmail(dot)com).

Info About Next Trailing Space Album + Project Status Updates

I have started to work on a new Trailing Space album. The project name is "Like Burning Cities Painting a Crimson Sky". My target is to make the ugliest and the most beautiful album I have created so far. There will be a shift of course in style compared to previous Trailing Space albums: The electronic post-rock stays, but there will be more real guitars, more improvisation and more progressive rock, krautrock and even heavy metal.

I already have a couple of songs ready (Kill Your Darlings, And The Rockets Dead Glare and Every Heart Will Be Attacked) . Some of them were originally produced for theater plays, but they all need a little bit better mixing, new content or overall finishing. I have also been recording a heavily King Crimson influenced prog rock track (Lateral Surface of Discord). It will be interesting!

Recycle, Remaster and Remaster project will also continue shortly. I have been a little bit busy with everything to remix anything. My Christmas holiday starts today so I probably have a little more time to contribute to my projects.

Next year I will also start to work on another theater project, but I don't know about it very much yet. The style will be something davidlynchian...

At The Gates of Addi(c)tive Synthesis

I've been in need for a high quality additive VSTi synth, but I have skipped Image-Line's Morphine just because their demo songs on their web page sound so poor reminding me of cheap General MIDI sounds on many products. Now when Image-Line started an X-Mas Sales offering Morphine for 99€ I decided to try the demo... Bam! I was immediately in love! The sound quality is very good, the synth is light weight and the usability is rather good for an additive synth, which are usually quite hard to operate. After tweaking a while I was sold on it and I purchased the plugin. It's nice there is soon lot of free time to make music and play with my new toy.

I haven't tested Gross Beat (the plugin included with my purchase) yet, but I will write about it later. If you are interested to purchase Morphine or IL's excellent multi-band compressor Maximus, I recommend buying it from here.

Jean Nine - Stars Are Neurons Of The Sky

During the Resurrect, Recycle & Remaster project my interests in IDM, broken beats, glitched rhythms and esoteric electronic sounds have risen again. I have also rediscovered how good the tracker interface is to slice, cut and rearrange sounds. Nowadays I use mostly VSTi synths/romplers intead of pure samples and I am used to a piano rolls as my sequencers.

During the last weekend I tried to make more sample oriented music and I managed to compose my first IDM track for a while. I cut some drum samples from a dubstep loop, loaded each sample as an individual Sampler channel in FL Studio and made a typical glitchy beat out of them. When the beat was ready I added some layers of melody (I used AquesTone to make that synthetic voice sound) and a bassline (a fat upright bass; I like to add some acoustic elements into midst of synthetic sounds). I also tried first time in my life Glitch to variate the beat here and there. I also used it to f*ck up the melody sequence at the end of the song.

The results were quite nice. Nothing revolutionary, but not bad either, I think. What do you think? Download the song and decide by yourself!

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 6: I Know I Leak

Ahh... It's Saturday and there is lots and lots of time to work with music. I decided to skip the last track from Flackworks EP and to resurrect next a track named I Know I Leak. It was originally released under my old mod label Kyoto Republik. Mod labels existed before modern mp3 labels and they did practically the same thing, only the format in which the music was released was different. Later Kyoto Republik turned into almost same named mp3 label Kyoto Republic. I Know I Leak is from year 2000 and it is quite typical IDM track with progressive song structure. It starts with quite simple ring modulated sounds, grows a little by little and finally just before the song ends really kicks in.

You can download the song from here and/or download the original module from here.

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 5: Herb Song

It's fifth track already! I continue to remaster/remix the Flackworks EP and this is the opening track, Herb Song. The delayed pad hit sound and family show melodies are back! The beat is quite gross and a little over distorted, but I let it be like it was, because of the contrast to otherwise soft and happy-happy-joy-joy atmosphere.

I started this project by using XMPlay + FL Studio combo and I have find it to be good. One problem is the lack of power in my few years old laptop when processing almost 20 stereo tracks same time. I need more memory and faster hard drive! Another problem is that XMPlay does not replay all my modules 100% correctly. Usually it is a minor thing, but sometimes the amount of misplaying is so overwhelming, that e.g. We Slay You With Our Orders, which uses a lot of Impulse Tracker's tricks, filters and bugs, does not work (yes, your read right: bugs - trackers used to have many programming errors and many musicians put to use those bugs to create interesting sounds).

I think I will try to run Impulse Tracker in Dosbox or something and exporting the song there. Someday when I have too much time.

Back to today's track: You can download it from here (or the original module from here).

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 4: Deaf & Blind

The fourth recycled track is Deaf & Blind from the same album as the previous song in RRR series: Flackworks EP. This is a sibling to my maybe most known track Bubblemaster 19100 (download mp3 version from here). A slower and less chaotic, but the same modulated drum sounds and NES-esque leads are present. I like the tremolos, vibratos and arpeggios heavily used on those lead sounds.

You can download the new version from here and the original Impulse Tracker module from here.

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 3: Flixotide (Epifenol Mix)

Today's RRR modernisation is track number three from Flack Works EP. The name of the song is Flixotide (Epifenol Mix) and it is more darker track than the previous tracks I have remastered. Cold clanging sounds, electro drums and simple bassline at the end of the song. I added some reverb and delay to the atmospheric sounds and filtered the bassline to make it a little more interesting. I believe I will remaster the whole EP, because in my opinion it does not have a single bad track.

You can download the new version from here and the original EP from here.

PS. I finally joined Facebook (am I a little slow to grab these modern things like blogging and social networks or what?).

Interesting New Netlabel: Fant00m Netlabel

I was listening to last.fm today and a nice interesting piece of music came by: Toasted Crispy by Fant00m. Some abstract cinematic triphop with Amon Tobin influences. A little bit of research and I found Fant00m is not only a band/collective, but also a netlabel releasing music for free. And their music is great! It is mostly dark and glooming but full of soul. It is quite a new netlabel but there are lots of releases already out. Worth of checking out.

Finnish ESC 2009 Candidates

This morning, Finnish broadcaster YLE published the songs which will will fight for the so called honour to represent Finland in the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow. As every previous year the songs are that typical ESC stuff you hear every single year: Mediocre and clichéd melodies and lyrics, constrained ethno influences, unsurprising song structures and de rigueur modulos. I wonder how even good acts always seem to make so embarassing material for this competition. The most of the songs were monotonous to listen to, but there were two highlights:

Signmark feat. Osmo Ikonen - Speakerbox

Hiphop, soul and r&b. Obviously the best song Finland can offer this year - and the Signmark's concept is unique: He combines visual sign language and the strong message of the deaf and express it through hip hop music.

Janita - Martian

This piece is also good. Beautiful voice combined with above-the-mediocre singer-songwriter type of song and fresh arrangement make a good deal here.

You can listen to all the other songs at http://euroviisut.yle.fi/euroviisut/2008-11-20/karsintakappaleet-2009