The pre-studio frustration is starting to peak. Nothing seems to work out fine, the contract for the album is still unsigned for the time being and we are scheduled to start recording one week from now. And about time too, I recorded the drum tracks for our previous album on May 2004 and it feels like half a lifetime ago. Actually I haven’t even seen a contract yet, there’s only a few e-mails where two different labels have expressed quite clearly that they will release the album if we want them to. Most of us in Sinisthra, including myself, wanted to cancel or at least postpone the recording when we last talked about it, only mr. Mäkinen was strongly of the opinion that nothing will be postponed and there will be no further talk of cancellations of any sort. His confidence has boosted mine as well and I will spend the remaining days rehearsing at home on my electronic drum kit, plus we still have one rehearsal with an almost full band. The main annoyance to me lately has been the forthcoming absence of a bass player when I’m laying down my parts in the studio. The main annoyance to other members seems to be the inadequate amount of rehearsing time we’ve put in for everyone to feel confident about the songs. It’s too late to rectify that now.

Personally I’m very confident about the songs. I know I can play my parts reasonably enough to let other people hear it too, and I’m pretty firmly of the opinion that the songs are dead lovely and deserve to be heard by other peole as well. The fickle inspiration I was waiting to pay a visit on my last post did pay a visit and now I’ve probably completed all the lyrics we’ll be needing. The word count is 1000 words with 207 lines, and compared to Misplaced Childhood’s word count of 2334 and 440 lines it means it’s not even half as good or extensive as I set it out to be. Another thing that’s too late to rectify now. At least I’ve had a bloody hard time completing it and given it a lot of thought during these past three years, and even though it’s not at all the tightly concepted monster I intended it to be I’m still rather sure that it’s a lot better than the lyrics on the first album were. I dropped the idea of putting together a concept album somewhere around the time when we’d written half the music of it for the very prosaic reason of not being able to come up with any kind of a concept strong enough to hold together an entire album and now I’m glad I did. I can safely say that the next album won’t be a concept album either because every other band nowadays seems to put out concept albums and I want to steer clear of all kinds of unifying concepts from now on. Down with unification! And while I’m at it, down with all kinds of other things too, including the unsureness surrounding the fact who’s going to cough up the money required to record the album in the end! Down with that sort of thing utterly!

THIS WEEKS’ SOURCE OF DELIGHT:
Spending a lovely day yesterday in the company of mr.Rytkönen the singer from my former band Protected Illusion. We hung out in the park outside the Tuska festival area and although we hadn’t seen each other for a decade the passing of years hadn’t really changed anything between us and it was all very nice and relaxed. I also enjoyed the company of mr. Mäkinen and mr.Leinonen and that’s worth a mention too, although I see them a lot more often and rare are the moments that I don’t enjoy the company of those particular gentlemen.
Another, though a lot more minor, source of delight is discovering the not-so-surprising-come-to-think-of-it-now fact that the more I practise on my drums the more my playing is improved. Well it is! My left leg is back in the game after some 15 years of just hanging in there.

THIS WEEKS’ SOURCE OF FRUSTRATION:
A lot of things concerning our beloved Sinisthra, as always. This decades’ source of frustration morelike. Sometimes I come close to wondering why we bother to keep up with all this hassle and these endless minor setbacks that surface when you try to make six people, most of them with families, appear in the same place at the same time, but then I go “oh yeah, it’s because of the music we come up with!” and almost immediately feel slightly better.

THIS WEEKS ALBUM OF CHOICE:
None. I haven’t really listened to anything for weeks and definitely not albums. Sometimes I think the pleasure you’re supposed to get from listening to music is largely exaggerated. Reading, on the other hand, is a completely different kettle of fish altogether.

THIS WEEKS’ BOOKS OF CHOICE:
“The Bat Tattoo”, not entirely unsurprisingly by Russell Hoban again. The hyperlink leads to a page with a detailed synopsis of the plot so I see no need for me to try and describe it any further. The book completes a loose sort of trilogy set in London and describing the at times dreamlike but mostly very prosaic happenings in the lives of various creative people, often wounded and scarred in some way. Mr. Hoban continuously succeeds in putting into words things that make other things stir in me and despite being some 50 years older than me, describes thoughts and feelings that I immediately familiarise with and feel very comfortable with. Perhaps because the things he writes about are so commonplace and banal that just about everyone can draw comparisons to their own lives from them. Or perhaps because the characters he creates and sets into motion are so full of uncertainties and flaws that you can easily identify with them and the things that they say and feel. All this banality is wrapped in eloquence of the kind one seldomly comes across (like,hilariously and vety aptly, calling a bunch of alcoholics a “low-budget drinking community”.) M. John Harrison’s thought provoking and insightful essay and review of this book here.

Russell Hoban clearly is my favourite author at the moment and I need to take a little break from his writings now so I can digest what I’ve read so far and not arrive too soon at that bitter-ish point where I find out I’ve read all of the books of my favoured author and can now only wait for him/her to publish a new novel which usually means at least two years of frustration-filled anticipation. This happened with Jonathan Carroll a while ago and this has been the case with Neil Gaiman since “Neverwhere”. So after eyeing China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station” with cautious suspicion for a bit, there lurking on the shelf surreptitiously and somehow malevolently, I picked up the new Tim Powers novel "Three Days To Never" instead and am now some 50 pages into it, wondering what exactly is happening in the book. Powers, as usual, plunges in on the deep end and lets the characters act out their abnormalities as if the unusual traits and qualities they possess were perfectly commonplace. His way of slowly unveiling the details as the plot develops made all his previous novels I’ve read very enjoyable to me and I expect for this novel to do the same.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Pio Cesare Barbera d'Alba, an Italian red wine of the more expensive variety. This materialised in my household as a present and fulfilled its’ function well but I don’t think I’d go out and buy a bottle myself. At that price it needs to be a little more remarkable than it turned out to be.
Pearly Bay, a white wine of not the most respected status, in a box, from South Africa. Still it fulfilled its’ own function very well in my opinion. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, outside in a beautiful summer evening, coupled with grilled fish and later also without food. Unfortunately the boxed red wine that was served was rather horrible and my inner defensive mechanisms prevent me from recalling the name of the wine at the moment.
Baden Pinot Gris Classic, my first dabble at “serious” German white wines, meaning the dry ones in this case, and a pleasant surprise at that. Nothing to complain about this, Pinot Gris is among the grapes I’m more fond of and this is a nice wine. Not nice enough to buy another bottle of, though.
Mayador, a dryish cider from Spain. I went out to buy wine but got this one instead because the bottle looked so lonely (and quite lovely,too) in the shelf and because I had nice memories of spanish ciders. The first glass tasted like something bordering on terrific, the second glass effectively usurped “terrific” and placed “terrible” in its’ stead, and after third glass I honestly couldn’t tell whether I liked it or not. This happened yesterday and I’m still undecided about this cider. Maybe I’ll remain forever so.

And o frustration hast thou, perchance, foundeth a new home in my heart. This always happens, at least to some degree, yet it always takes me by surprise as it happens. With the average of two and a half songs composed for Sinisthra per year for the past five or so years, one would think that coming up with an adequate amount of lyrics wouldn’t pose a problem of this calibre. A few verses with a nice chorus to go with it, shouldn’t take longer than 30 minutes maximum and then I can have the rest of the day off.

Only it isn’t so at all. I ‘m clearly adapting a more and more Douglas Adamsian kind of writing mode the older I get, meaning that no matter how much I’d like to write, I just forbid it and I’m strictly not allowed to write anything, especially if there’s the slightest possibility of me enjoying it and actually ending up creating something worthwhile. Therefore once again, in a seemingly most unfortunate development, I appear to have misplaced my lyric writing abilities entirely. As I often do on occasions like this. A brand new shining composition all finished musically, waiting to be recorded in a few weeks’ time, with a handful of days to go until the first and last time we get to try it out on rehearsals before putting it down on album, and I can’t piece two words together to form anything reasonable. Completing a five word sentence feels like something that only happens in fantasy movies and to people who don’t exist in real life.

Was it always THIS hard? If it was, I’ve blissfully forgotten. Although I suspect it wasn’t. Maybe it’s pre-album stress, maybe I’m too happy with my life and too at peace with myself nowadays, maybe I’ve set my standards so high that I can’t come up with anything good enough anymore. And maybe, after grieving and moaning over it for another few days and half-consciously falling back on all kinds of displacement activities, like updating this blog, the words just spill out of me as they’ve usually done before. So it’s back to listening to “Misplaced Childhood” and reading John Keats and waiting for fickle inspiration to pay a visit.

THIS WEEKS’ SOURCE OF FRUSTRATION:
The lyric that refuses to come. Not much of a frustration really, more of a pleasant challenge. At least still for now, although the pleasantness may flake and wither if nothing continues to be the result of my efforts. Mostly my frustrations are fleeting and far between these days and that’s a blessing after years and years of feeling constantly agitated and unwell.

THIS WEEKS’ SOURCE OF DELIGHT:
Probably the same as last weeks’, which I didn’t mention then and won’t mention now either. None of your business actually, just the little shapeless everyday things that make me feel all good and warm inside.

THIS WEEKS ALBUM OF CHOICE:
“Watershed” by Opeth. Probably a lot of other peoples’ choice as well nowadays and therefore not needing much of an introduction or deeper analysis. Outstanding musicianship and the quality of songwriting is way beyond the reach of mere mortals.

THIS WEEKS’ BOOKS OF CHOICE:
First Russell Hoban’s “Amaryllis Night And Day” and then Graham Joyce’s “Dreamside”, both dealing with the concept of lucid dreaming which fascinates me to a certain degree. Russell’s novel is a more surrealistic one and very enjoyable at that, with nothing much explained and a lot left for the reader to find out and comprehend. I’m not sure how much I comprehended and found out but I liked the book anyway although it didn’t live up to my expectations after starting out on Russell Hoban with his tremendous “Medusa Frequency” and then waiting for all his other books to be as shaking and captivating as that one.

“Dreamside”, then. At first I wasn’t sure how it’s going to turn out for me, with sentences like “memories clung to him like the tentacles of a deep-sea creature” but it got better once the story got underway and anyway it’s Graham Joyce’s first novel, with lovely ones like “The Limits Of Enchantment” to come later on so I decided I’m going to enjoy it before I actually started enjoying it for real. I’m halfway through it now and still occasionally wondering whether it’s good or not. He has a way of composing his sentences that I admire greatly but leafing back the pages just now I couldn’t find any of the real impressive ones and couldn’t remember them either, so either I’m too tired right now or the sentences weren’t THAT impressive after a while.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Trivento Reserve Malbec. They sure seem to know how to turn malbec grape into tremendous red wine in Argentina and I sure seem to respect their capability and enjoy the outcome of their efforts. Although not the best malbec I’ve tasted, a glass or two of this is still guaranteed to wipe several kinds of irritations and wearinesses away,just like that, and bring joy and illumination to even the glummest and sulkiest of souls. Some of whom might originally have achieved a closer knowledge of glumness and other things sulky after tasting a definition-escaping rosé wine from Chile called Tenta Merlot Rosé. Maybe it’s just me and maybe I’m just crouching behind that particular stone where the light of rosé wine fails to shine but I can’t for the life of me think of anything positive to say about any of the rosé I’ve ever tasted. Which isn’t to say I’m not prepared to give these wines another try sometime. Trivento Malbec Rosé sounds promising, and probably tastes not very promising at all.

But before that there’s a dozen or so white wines I’d rather gulp through first. Les Salices Viognier from France is one of them, better than average but unfortunately not entirely free of the pungent qualities I dislike about white wines and therefore not making it on my to-buy-again list. Gatão is a nice vinho verde from Portugal, light, a bit too acidic and slightly bubbly, ideal for hot summer days when served very chilled and an ok companion to pasta as well, but this won’t make it on the to-buy-again list either. Gazela was superior compared to this as vinho verdes go and Gazela is definitely on the list.