Quoth Plato: “Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.”


My major guideline in writing this blog has always been “if you can’t think of anything worthwhile to write, start writing anyway”. If Plato were to surf the web, anxious to, say, find out more about Sinisthra, perhaps the philosophical aspects of regular coughing, sputtering and coming-to-a-standstill-for-months of the engine that powers Sinisthra, and the allegedly fascinating music the band claims to have recorded and hollowly threatens to release any year now, and click a link leading here, he probably wouldn’t hesitate much in deciding which one of the definitions in the quotation above would suit me better. I boldly stand behind my thesis of firmly allowing form to override content when the amount of content on supply is insufficient. This concept has proved most fruitful during the years and is summarised in the title I, much to the dismay of others involved, forced upon one of the early demo-cd’s of Sinisthra (still called Nevergreen back then), “Empty Banalities Adorned With Dashing Eloquence”.

Content is wildly overrated in my opinion. Of course it helps if you have a blindingly brilliant idea to start out with but in no way it is essential to have one in order to come up with something that seemingly has one. You just write whatever comes out, review it, remove or replace the most obviously crap lines until what is left passes on as decent. Then you repeat the process as many times as necessary to make the text look shiny. The possible meanings and allusions then may or may not be there and it doesn’t really matter whether they exist or not, especially in something as abstract as a song lyric. They might surface later. There might be revelations, a few years down the line, of the “so-THAT’S-what-I-meant-with-it” kind. And since it’s not possible to control in any way how other people read into whatever, it shouldn’t be the headache of the writer how the writings are perceived.

It’s a bit harder to apply this method to ordinary prose but not impossible at all, as everything contained in this blog entry clearly demonstrates. Almost 400 words written so far (according to the “Word Count” feature of the program I’m using) and none of them planned beforehand.  I’m just whiling away the Sunday afternoon, writing whatever springs to mind and trying to ward off the frustration gushing forth from the seemingly bottomless well of unfulfilled and stalled musical aspirations. The Puritan album project I’m part of has lain dormant for over a year now and doesn’t look likely to reactivate itself in the near future. I’m pretty ok with the situation since my involvement with it wasn’t so intense to start out with, with no artistic input apart from playing drums. I miss the company of mr. Hynninen the vocalist of The Puritan and look forward to working with him again at some point, after his current activities of singing with Spiritus Mortis and releasing a solo album relent a little.


The major thorn in my side is the endlessly prolonged Sinisthra album project though. It recently became clear that we are forced to put things on hold once again, probably until the end of the year, just when I had, in a somewhat naive manner, gingerly envisioned it getting finished before autumn. I’m happy about the recognition and attention, not to mention income mr. Joutsen the singer of Sinisthra is in the receiving end of, fronting Amorphis. He surely deserves it and the amount of talent he possesses would have dramatically gone to waste were he to have stayed only a singer of an obscure smalltime band from Lohja. Sometimes it’s just a bit hard to come to terms with the cold facts and the slow working pace his main involvements force upon the progress of our mutual little hobby that is Sinisthra. I sorely need to get this album off my back and have been needing it for a good while by now. I know I will, eventually, but until that happens the songs will run in circles in my head, in a turbulent flow, drastically eroding my peace of mind. The hardest part is the waiting part, the lying low in a pool of inactivity, and it doesn’t help to have a radio playing in the background as I write this, rotating “House Of Sleep” and “Silver Bride” on an hourly basis.

Oh well. Things happen when things are bound to happen and I need to come to grips with that. I might as well wrap this up with another fitting quote, this time by the stunningly enwigged officially-appointed-by-British-government poet Thomas Shadwell:

“The haste of a fool is the slowest thing in the world.”

PS. This link, unequivocally and invariably, leads to “Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century”, the one-stop blog spot for your Nineteenth Century Mustache needs! Phew! Pretty essential stuff.