I frequently wonder where’s the sense in keeping up a mostly non-functional band. I hate the idea of playing music as a “hobby” and I strictly refuse to let things slip to a point where it becomes a so-called therapy band. So I frequently wonder where’s the sense and what keeps me from giving up. When I consider the pros and cons of being in a band the negative side clearly outweighs the positive. There’s six people in Sinisthra, living in three different cities so organising rehearsals is complicated. Six people with differing views and opinions is way too many to get anything creative done and actually finish it too. This sometimes puts an additional strain on the overall mood once the rehearsals finally take place. Usually the rehearsals fail to take place since there doesn’t seem to be a good enough reason to rehearse. Playing just for the sake of playing has lost its’ appeal years ago, to me at least. I want to make records that contain music I can be proud of.

The biggest strain is without a doubt this aimlessness we’ve been trying to cope with for the past few years. It’s hard to stay motivated if your only goal is to “release an album once the songs are written” but you have no one to release the album or even pay for its’ recording. Now the songs are finally written and ready to be recorded but the negotiations with labels have been faltering greatly after a promising start. I’ve been at it for six months now and it has amounted to nothing but frustration and dozens and dozens of e-mails, from me along the lines of “now do you want it or not” and from the other parties along the lines of “yes we do thank you” but still nothing happens. Pardon my french but my sentiments on this whole record label-subject boils down to “I hate this shit”. The most infuriating aspect of this kind of dawdling is that it literally breaks the bands up after shattering their morale first. This has gnawed at the core of Sinisthra, too, for a long time now. During my particularly pessimistic bouts I sometimes think that Sinisthra has already ended years ago. We released an album on 2005, did several live shows after that and since then the band has been more or less dormant, with the singer understandably focusing his time and attention mainly on creating a career in a much bigger band, and also, although on a much smaller scale, the drummer and the guitarist being involved in another band too.

Mr. Joutsen has released two albums with Amorphis (that went, deservedly, gold in Finland) and toured the world. Me and Mr. Välimäki have recorded and released two albums with The Puritan (that didn’t go gold anywhere and weren’t exactly supposed to) and our first cd release on Spinefarm Records is actually being mastered today in Finnvox while I’m writing this. The other members of Sinisthra have been doing what people with dayjobs and families do, while trying to find some time here and there for the band too. The latest negative development is our bass player moving to another city, far enough to present a brand new set of problems for making the band rehearsals happen.

But we’re not breaking up just yet, if it’s up to me. The only positive side is still as rewarding as it always were, maybe even more so nowadays. I still think the music we come up with is wonderful and playing the songs can’t be compared to anything else or explained satisfactorily to someone who doesn’t know what it feels like. That’s enough for me to keep going. But I really need to resolve this “who’s going to release the album”-business first.

THIS WEEKS’ SOURCE OF FRUSTRATION:
Summer passed us by this year in Finland, with only a slightest nod of acknowledgement of “yes I know what season it’s supposed to be but I don’t care” before skipping straight into autumn. I wore a woolly sweater today when going outside and that’s not something I’d willingly do on August. We didn’t have a proper winter this year either. The endtimes undeniably are upon us and as soon as the birds start to fly backwards I’m prepared to sprinkle dust on my head and roll in the ashes.

THIS WEEKS’ SOURCE OF DELIGHT:
It’s not all doom and gloom though, what with all the summer-not-happening and Sinisthra-not-releasing-an-album. There’s always biscuits, and circus. With a stronger emphasis on circus this time. Cirque Plume from France have performed their “Plic Ploc” show in Helsinki for a few weeks now to sold out audiences. How to describe a show where people (but not the audience) get drenched by showers of water on regular basis and throw somersaults and play all kinds of instruments when they’re not getting drenched? My backside grew numb during their two hour show and it was very crowded in a tent full of people but it was a lovely experience and well worth the high-ish ticket price. The last time I laughed as much and as freely was when I swam in the Mediterranean Sea last month. It’s easy not to laugh like a child when brooding on band-related things but it’s very hard not to laugh like a child while swimming in a warm sea, or while visiting a good circus.

I really hadn’t listened to any music for weeks so I thought it would be a good idea to put some on while I was fiddling about with the layout of this site some time ago. I ended up having a mellow afternoon of casually listening to obscure, and mostly very awful indeed, prog records. It cleanses the soul, listening to very awful prog records, though it won’t necessary do it in a pleasant way. I have a folder on my computer called “Silly Ancient Prog Records” where I put stuff I used to download from a prog hub in DC++ and there’s all kinds of weak and pretentious albums in there, mostly of the kind people over at Prog Archives claim to be “a lost masterpiece”. Some of those “masterpieces” are examples of the curious kind of masterpiecery that manifests itself in an aural form of almost complete unlistenability. This kind of records are among the most sought after when one needs to cleanse ones’ soul thoroughly and according to regulations, and this kind of records are very rarely made these days. Fortunately variously confused musical virtuosos indiscriminately churned them out by bucketloads back in the golden Seventies. Maybe Sinisthra will do one too, one day. On my more loose moments I fantasise about putting together an albums’ worth of music of such absurd drivel sprinkled with utter choruslessness that everyone who liked Sinisthra in the past will be enormously disappointed. On my less loose moments I understand that we might need to release one or two albums with more coherent and rationally structured songs before that. And on my moments of minimum mental looseness I wonder will we get to release anything at all, coherent or not.

But back to those crappish old prog albums. Apart from the forgettable ones I used to listen to as a teenager and had almost completely forgotten about, like “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield, “Valentyne Suite” by Colosseum, “Journey To The Center Of The Earth” by Rick Wakeman (this album truly escapes definition), “A Tab In The Ocean” by Nektar (which wasn’t all that bad) and the debut album of Nine Days’ Wonder (which is really quite good) I treated my ears to the utter horribleness of “the Sentinel” by Pallas (which I used to think was quite good but clearly wasn’t), “The Wake” by IQ and something by Solstice and Pendragon I already forgot about. There was a reason why Marillion was the most successful of the so-called neo-prog bands of the early 80’s and the reason is most of the others were cheesy and not very good at all. Prog albums from this period of time are the most horrible ones of them all.

So, compared to 80’s prog, back in the 70’s they did it with marginally better taste, probably the best possible available at the time. Regrettably it often wasn’t enough, even though there’s bands like Neuschwanstein, Mirthrandir, Babylon, Cathedral and England, who all seem to have emulated the sound made famous by Yes and/or Genesis, released only one album respectively and then vanished. Depending on my mood of the moment, these either sound halfway decent but seriously lacking of original musical ideas, or carefully thought out and orchestrated compositions that require repeated listens to fully bloom and reward the listener. I hadn’t heard of any of these until very recently and will delve deeper into their albums as time permits. If I still happen to feel like it. The Neuschwanstein album, called “Battlement” and released on the not-very-prog-friendly year of 1979, sounds particularly promising, probably because the singer reminds me very much of young Peter Gabriel and the compositions aren’t very far removed from Genesis, either.

Which reminds me of my recent (and still active) favourite, The Watch from Italy. In their four albums they’ve ripped off old Genesis so shamelessly that a band of lesser talent or nerve would never have pulled it off in the first place. Check out the video below. They look absolutely non-cool and ridiculous on it but the music they make is just fantastic.



THIS WEEKS’ BOOKS OF CHOICE:
I’ve been wading through Tim Powers’ “Three Days To Never” for over a month now and it’s finally starting to reach its conclusion. Although it contains numerous very original ideas and situations that are characteristic of his writing (like a blind woman who can see and function by “hijacking” the sight of anyone who comes close enough) it’s still not up there among his best books in my opinion. Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin are among the people who dabble inexpertly with time travel, unaware of its’ consequences and then all kinds of things take place, like people being erased to the point of never having existed at all, and a reader getting incredibly bored with it all.

As a bedside book I have “The Encyclopedia of Stupidity” by Matthijs van Boxsel. So far I haven’t been able to understand anything contained within its’ pages but the cover has a nice picture of a sheep.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
I just noticed, half horrified and half amused, that I’ve bought six bottles of wine during this past week. Which doesn’t sound very healthy, even though most of them were not consumed on the spot but went into the drinks cabinet for later use. I’m not planning to keep up this buying pace in the future though, it’s just there are so many wines I’d like to taste and seemingly so little time to do so. Most of the wines are kind of so-so but occasionally there comes along a bottle that lines everything with silver and elegantly crowns the moment.
Canaletto Montepulciano d'Abruzzo from Italy and Talus Pinot Noir from United States are not wines of that kind, although there’s nothing wrong with them either. Both of them produced that warm fuzzy feeling in my chest area I was expecting red wine to produce. Both of them whispered funny ideas to the tongue, lips and other necessary-for-speech-making components of my body, causing me to momentarily become slightly more talkative than usual. Both of them left a nice overall impression and both of them are now checked out and will not be further checked out in the future.

Avesso from Portugal was very disappointing. It wasn’t the kind of semi-sparkling vinho verde I was expecting at all. Maybe my misguided expectations caused me to judge it too harshly but all I can say is it was a very average white wine that turned quite pungent after warming up in the glass for a while and didn’t perform very well with the batatas in the dinner.

The Bernard-Massard Auxerrois from Luxemburg was quite the opposite. This wine took the food containing batatas and chicken gently in its’s arms and gave it a good loving cuddle. Clearly one of the best experiences I’ve had of the food and wine perfectly complimenting each other. This was at lunchtime before going to a rock festival nearby. Doubtful as I am, I had a very late supper of the same combination after returning from the festival and it was just as great again. So this dinner before and after was probably the best thing in the whole Ankkarock festival. Otherwise it was mostly standing bored in various non-moving queues, first to get inside somewhere, then to get a horrible-tasting drink of artificial “cider”, then to the toilet and then to get out of that somewhere. All this surrounded by approx. billions of people repeating the same behavioural cycle. All the bands I might have felt like checking out were playing at a different stage than the one I was located near to. Therefore my live music experience was limited to a bit of watching Tomi growl and make faces on the screen and listening to the distant boom of Amorphis playing. So this auxerrois rescued the day and made it somewhat worthwhile. And it still tasted great the next day, without the food and served not-so-cold. I definitely need to buy this wine again, and I definitely need to put more effort on pronouncing the grapes’ name successfully.

Stepping off the train the other day, I caught a glimpse of a teenage male of hip-hop persuasion in front of me and accidentally took the text at the back of his hooded sweater to be the title of a Phil Collins solo album from the 80’s. Of course it wasn’t so, on a second glance, but for a moment the similarity of the font used was enough to convince me this here youth thought the height of cool is sporting a Phil Collins hoodie, with “Hello, I Must Be Going” printed at the back with the kind of hastily scribbled longhand Phil was so keen on using on his album covers, coupled with those painfully intimate too-close-for-comfort shots of his mug from different positions.

This got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be a very bold declaration of individuality if a young person, seeking for a convenient wall to nail his personal thesis on and looking for a soapbox of adequate height to climb and hurl his viewpoints and statements at the world, to take to liking an artist as far removed from the artists most commonly favoured by his or her coevals? “This mainstream stuff everyone is so hot about pisses me off extremely so in order to feel superior I will from now on only listen to Phil Collins albums”? No?

No. Actually, “yes” to most of the points, about searching for your own voice and a place to stand and needing to feel superior and needing to despise the mindless masses, we’ve all done that in a certain age and there’s nothing wrong with that. The “no”-part is the Phil Collins part. If you replace his name with almost any other name of an elderly artist who released his most relevant albums decades ago you’d still get a lot of young people liking the music. The new Alice Cooper album is playing on the radio as I write this. Neil Young played a show in Helsinki a few days ago and I’m sure there were many teenagers in the audience. It’s not uncommon to see a kid wearing an Ozzy Osbourne t-shirt. But none of this applies to Phil Collins.


The problem of Phil Collins is that Phil Collins never was cool and never will be cool. I think the picture above clearly demonstrates the impossibleness of calling Phil “cool” in the 70’s. Fortunately he gave up the beard some years later, probably because after the concept of “music video” was invented, no lead vocalist was allowed to look like that anymore. Back in 1985, I was a 14-year old wiseass know-it-all and as devoted a follower of Genesis and other prog music as only a 14-year old can be when Phil Collins released “Sussudio”, the first single of his third solo album “No Jacket Required”. If you check out the video I’m sure you’ll understand the difficult position it put a young and devoted prog music fan into. No wonder I wholeheartedly pursued the new path suddenly opening before me when a little later I was introduced to “Ride The Lightning” by a hot new group called Metallica who probably didn’t rank “Sussudio” among their major musical influences. And so the rest of my teenage years were wasted in a stupor of thrash metal albums and empty beer bottles. I blame this on Phil Collins.

He was quite a capable drummer, though. Maybe I’m just jealous. Jealous of his drumming capability I’m never able to match and jealous of his 70’s beard and the sheer nerve of a man who lets something like that sprout out of his face.

Here’s the video of “Sussudio”.

Our household comprises of four different entities: me, my fiancée, her dog and my cat. I’m now going to take a closer look on how we communicate with each other.

ME AND HER:
Obviously there’s no problem with our communication. We communicate on several different levels: body language and the variations thereof, including but not limited to the entirely rejoicable fulfilling of pre-marital duties. There’s also the type of body language communication in which she is especially good at, where she asks me would it be a good idea to give the apartment a really thorough and excessive spring cleaning and my mouth answers “yes of course it would, what a great idea” while at the same time my eyes avert her eyes and my limbs start to twitch nervously. This is my bodys’ way of communicating the fact that while I think it essentially is a good idea, hypothetically speaking, I'm strongly in favour of making sure it also stays safely within the boundaries of mere hypothetic. Since she reads me so effortlessly, I sometimes wonder why I bother saying something I don’t really mean since my body language immediately betrays me anyway.

Then there’s the verbal communication, the actual conversation. I don’t think we have any limits in choosing the topics we can discuss, although she tends to avoid the more obscure and/or biblical subjects I sometimes come up with, while I tend to find myself with not a lot to contribute to the more intellectual subjects she likes to bring up but usually find myself enjoying her detailed monologues anyway. But all in all, I think we have a good communication and we respect each others’ opinions and desires.

ME AND MY CAT:
We go back a long way, some 15 years, so although we might not always have what could be called “communication” at least we have an understanding of sorts. I like to speak to the cat and in 9 cases out of 10, the cat likes to ignore me. I’ve always been speaking to the cat, back in the days when there was only the two of us there was naturally no one else to talk to so I used to babble on, often in mock-Indian english like Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from the Simpsons, and the cat would sleep, or occasionally look at me, incomprehensibly, and sometimes it might meow if it wanted to be fed. This hasn’t changed much to this day and I think we have a good and solid relationship of me caring about the cat and the cat caring about itself.

SHE AND HER DOG:
While of course I’m not in the position to make a deeper analysis of their relationship, during the past few years I’ve noticed that she is the absolute centre of the dogs’ universe and nothing can come between that. The dog is obedient to her to the bone, can sit when told to sit and always, always comes when its’ name is called. This used to mystify me a lot, to the point of me asking her “does it ALWAYS come when you call??” and her finding my question hilarious. The cat almost never comes when its’ name is called, and when it does come, it must be mostly by accident or by coincident. I know the cat recognises its’ name though, it just doesn’t care. Nowadays it doesn’t matter as such, because no matter whether you call the dog or the cat by their names, the dog always comes.

So, the dog worships her and does everything she tells the dog to do, she’s the absolute leader of the pack and there’s no doubt about that. Their communication is smooth and their relationship seems almost symbiotic at times.

ME AND HER DOG:
The dog used to growl at me when I climbed into her bed with the dog already there. This used to amuse me enormously since the dog weighs a bit under 2 kilos and therefore doesn’t pose an immediate threat to my life as such. As time went by, it grudgingly had to accept me being there, sleeping in their bed, and admit that I was the superior officer and higher in the pecking order. We communicate to a certain degree: it comes when I call it and sometimes performs tricks when I ask, tolerates my endless hassling to a point and always lets me tickle its’ belly. So I like to think it likes me. I certainly like it a lot.

But I can’t talk to it at all. She’s told me that you need to say bye-bye to the dog when you leave, otherwise, if you just leave without saying anything, it starts whining and panicking. I often try but I always feel like an complete idiot. The dog looks at me and listens to me when I talk to it, and probably even vaguely understands what I try to communicate, and I still feel like an idiot. When I talk to the cat, the cat might shift a bit and carry on sleeping, or disregard me completely, but I feel perfectly normal and not like an idiot at all, talking to the cat.

SHE AND MY CAT:
The dog was recently away for over a month and the cat was having a grand time, acting utterly lovable, affable and companionable. This came as a big surprise to her, especially since the cat directed a lot of its’ attention to her while I wasn't at home. Their relationship deepened visibly during the time the cat thought the dog would never return again and she probably started to see the cat a bit more like the way I see it. Their communication is limited but they communicate, undeniably.

MY CAT AND HER DOG:
Theirs is a kind of communication not entirely dissimilar to something George W. Bush and Osama bin Laben might have, were they forced to share the same one-room-and-a-kitchen apartment with an unsolvable unclarity regarding the very delicate subject of who drinks out of whos’ waterbowl. The dog makes ceaseless attempts at communicating, by shoving its’ backside near the cat’s face, or running in circles around the cat, yapping and growling simultaneously. The cats’ take on this communicating business is staring expressionless at the dog (which makes the dog extremely nervous and unsure since it translates it as an expression of hostility), or slapping the dog at the snout with a paw if it comes too close. This endless string of false judgements, misapprehension and the general air of scarcely-tolerating-each-others-presence has provided us humans hours and hours’ worth of fun and entertainment.

So they communicate but never get understood by each other correctly, and this would be tragic if it wasn’t so very hilarious. The only time they stand somewhat united is when it’s necessary to make a strategic withdrawal under the bed as the vacuum cleaner is plugged in.



With every opening of a fridge door there’s a possibility, although most of the times only a very remote one, of fillets of ham being handed out in generous portions. This possibility can sometimes lure the animals to accidentally sit within spitting distance of each other.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Carlo Rossi California Rosé. Just when I had made my mind up for ever that I definitely am not enjoying any kind of rosé wine, I came across this in a wedding last weekend, and since it was the only kind of wine on offer, I had several glasses and was pleasantly surprised. It was sweetish, a bit on the thin side with a lower alcohol content than usual, and there were hints of strawberry which always is a positive thing to me. Seems the sparkling things need to be demi-sec for me to approve of them and the same applies to rosés as well.

Brown Brothers Shiraz is a very full-bodied red wine from Australia. It had been crouching behind the more desirable bottles for months at the back of the drinks cabinet and maybe it should have stayed there. The bouquet exploded from the glass in an intense slap of smoked ham and other heavy and mouldy odours. It filled the mouth somewhat comprehensively too, fortunately not tasting of what it had smelled of. With an alcohol content of 14,5% one glass was enough to thoroughly warm my insides up in an already uncomfortably warm summer evening. The next day this shiraz showed its’ best sides with spicy lasagne.

The Loved One enjoys her cavas and other sparkling wines very much and as dry as possible. I’m still adjusting to her tastes with my penchant for sweeter bubbly things. I had a list of cavas to check out in Spain if possible but unfortunately they were all on the more expensive side so we settled for the cheapish brands and didn’t come across anything very remarkable. I was also disappointed to find out that there were hardly any import wines on offer at all so finding nice vinho verdes sadly was a doomed attempt.

After we got back to Finland we got our engagement rings and had a glass of José Michel champagne at Foxy Wine House in Helsinki. Which was extremely nice. And this time I found nothing to complain about although it was extra brut.