One of the things I really really like to do is soak myself in a bathtub for outrageously prolonged periods of time. During this a-soaking, I carefully monitor and adjust the water temperature, alternately adding cold or hot water from the tap to attain and then maintain the ideal bathing conditions and to ensure that the maximum amount of relaxation and laid-backness is achieved. Bath foam and randomly floating rubber ducks are an pleasant extra but not necessary. This professionally manufactured bathing experience, once underway, could then take hours to carry out if I have no immediate pending obligations to fulfill. And while bathing, I like to Really Think Things Through.

Usually this means receiving and sorting out a bundle of rampant lyrical and compositional ideas. Full blown musical arrangements rage on in the auditorium of my head, smashing hit singles or progressive epics with quirks and twists to them I’ll never be able to properly explain to the other guys in the band since I have no grasp on how to handle any kind of melodic instrument whatsoever. Occasionally some of these ideas filter through to Sinisthra arrangements but mostly they just linger awhile in my head and then are gone like a lot of my other ideas too.

Although frustrating at times, as a whole this doesn’t bother me that much. The most enjoyable part is getting the ideas, anyway, not executing them. But the minor setback here is that I have no bathtub, haven’t had for the past 15 years. So either all my ideas are at least 15 years old or I don’t actually have any ideas. Or I have devised a cheap substitute for bathing with ideas and rubberducks.

What I’ve come up with is this: I take extensive showers. The average length of these daily sessions is some 30 minutes. Rubberducks are useless in this environment, as well as bubble foam, but the constant rain of cosily warm water on my head is guaranteed to trigger all kinds of thoughts to inspect closer and mull over. I came up with this text while taking a shower. Countless troublesome lines for lyrics have found their shape while taking a shower. The Gordian Knot-like question of whether to put on a Marillion or Genesis cd after the shower has been sorted out while taking a shower. There is no underestimating the problem-solving power of taking a shower.

There is a down side to ardent showering, naturally. Part of growing up is realising that all good things come with a pricetag and the pricetags of really great things are never of the “discounted”-variety. In the building where I live warm water costs 10 euros per cubic metre ( that’s 1000 litres), the bill is presented twice a year and it’s always hundreds of euros. I’m expecting one of those bills to arrive next week and, come to think of it, I don’t really want to think about it at all. I think I’ll go take a shower now and think of utterly other things.

THIS WEEKS’ SOURCE OF FRUSTRATION:
None deserving a mention so far. The Silence Of The Record Labels has partially broken, with a perfectly reasonable explanation (of the label manager becoming a father prematurely) behind the lack of correspondence as opposed to various conspiracy theories I feverishly imagined up (“they don’t answer my mail for one reason only: they all want to hurt me and make me feel bad because doing that would magnificently help their cause of releasing other peoples’ records!”) during my sleepless nights of sobbing on my pillow and grieving for the recording-contractlessness of Sinisthra. There’s still the issue of money to resolve before anything goes any further. We tell them how much we need and they tell us how much they pay and the gap between those two sums is a long and winding road on a as-yet-unbuilt bridge over troubled water that needs to be constructed first for the negotiators to stroll upon then and maybe meet somewhere halfway. Or maybe not.

THIS WEEKS’ SOURCE OF DELIGHT:
Partaking in a pleasant process of having some quality time with my brothers’ family. Also, while doing so, half-accidentally stumbling upon a chance to experience some live music. Sad Circus a lovely band from our hometown Lohja and I hereby advise everyone to check out their music at http://www.myspace.com/sadcircus. The song “After The Earthquakes” is particularly impressive. Also also, reading an interview on a recent Miasma magazine of The Puritan where nothing much is revealed and therefore finding it good.

THIS WEEKS’ BOOK OF CHOICE:
is the same as last weeks’ book of choice with the possibility of becoming next weeks’ book of choice as well. So many pages and not many moments reserved for turning those pages. But it’s all very good and entertaining and at the moment they are discovering a Martian spaceship, those lucky characters from Richard Morgans’ “Broken Angels”.

THIS WEEKS ALBUM OF CHOICE:
“The Second Wave” by Khoma. Released a few years ago, their second album presents the loveliness of Khoma to a far wider audience after the limited pressing of “Tsunami”, their first one, on a Finnish indie label. This was released by Roadrunner but sadly it seems the band is now dropped from Roadrunners’ catalogue. Their homepage is also down but there’s a brief message on http://www.myspace.com/khoma saying they’re still operational at least. “Tsunami” was a collective favourite in Sinisthra camp back in the days when we were still called Nevergreen and I’d say it also influenced our music to a certain extent. “The Second Wave” takes a logical step forward with expanded soundscapes and improved song-writing. The band is sometimes compared to the likes of Radiohead and Muse but mostly they have a sound of their own, with imaginative drumming and very heart-felt sounding vocals. The darkness and melancholy of this album doesn’t exactly make it best suited for sunny springtime listening though. Still, this band deserves to be much bigger than they currently are and this album deserved much more recognition than it got.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
The Tower Shiraz , a very unremarkable red wine from South Africa. Tasted on a sunny day in a barbecue I found nothing in it to throw somersaults to. Of course, most of the wines are unremarkable just as most of all other things too. That makes the remarkable ones stand out, and the reason I’m writing this is to find and then remember the really good ones later on too. So far, the list is very short: several reasonably priced red wines (Valpolicella Superiore Zenato and La Chamiza Malbec spring to mind) and from the white ones everything I’ve tasted made from Albariño grapes and very few others. I spent recently a week in southern Spain and among many other pleasant experiences was introduced to wines from Rias Baixas area. Sadly they are very hard to acquire in Finland, but, on examining Albariño I found Vinho Verde which is easily and not-very-expensively available in Finland too, and as a result I’ve had a most wonderful time lately with Gazela. Now there’s a wine for all occasions and in an this weeks’ ideal world I’d spend my days loafing around my estates in, say, Spain, sipping chilled vinho verde with an accidental glass of sangria thrown in, and doing nothing much for a while. That’s how my week in Spain mostly went (with the exception of the estate being someone else’s and not mine) and that’s how I’m prepared to spend some other weeks there as well, as soon as possible.