TIDES OF BLOOD PART II (2016)

released

2nd May 2016(free download, CD)

story

Tides of Blood II was recorded almost completely in the same sessions as the first part. First the drums were recorded over a weekend, then all the other instruments over a course of few weeks. After that the vocals were recorded and everything was finalized for Tides of Blood I and then the same process was applied to Tides of Blood II. I think the overall sound is a bit better because I had already learned of my mistakes with the first part and had more time to figure out what to do. Still, I was still doing automation edits on the last night before going to mastering.

The song Z. is the oldest of these. The intro harmonics were a riff I came up in December 2011. It was the first thing I composed after hearing about the death of Jukka "Zuge" Laajakallio, of the band Abduktio. Thus, I decided to dedicate the song to him. The song was written quite quickly up to the chorus, but the rest of it took some time, but not probably more than a year.

In late 2013, I had four long songs and thought it was too heavy for an album. I came up with the idea of a double EP (or triple EP) and decided to write more material. Those sessions yielded Dark Horizon and Valediction of a Victim. I was also trying out other songs but these two ideas seemed the best.

Valediction of a Victim was composed initially through the gang vocal part. I just put that vocal part roughly over a click and started trying different riffs and drum beats under it. It was a quite unorthodox way of writing for me. The beginning of the song was more or less normal CRP and the later half to instrumental post rock, nu-metal, doom and even some cheesy power metal with the synth solo. For the ending, I wanted to make it like Sunn O))) with a symphony orchestra.

The song is dedicated to Juho Koivuaho of the band Plain Fade, who passed away in 2013, around the time I was working on the song. I was lucky enough to have his bandmates and friends join in on the gang vocal.

I was really satisfied with how Dark Horizon became in the end, although I cannot really remember what I was thinking when I composed it. It has something to do with the Mastodon tuning and a chord shape you can grab easily. Basically it's a heavy blues riff, the chords are really simple and it's just the same chord progression all the way. I wanted the song to start with full blast and end beautifully, unlike most CRP stuff. And it worked. There's something special about that song.

Dark Horizon was really difficult to mix because everything is so big. Drums, bass, rhythm guitars, lead guitars, synths...I kept pushing everything louder after each other but finally ended with a balance I like. The song is also so slow that it was hard to record the guitars over the pre-recorded drums and get a good groove going on.

A fun fact is that Dark Horizon was the first song that was played live from the Tides of Blood EP's. We played it live in December 2014 because Vesa the bass player wanted to play a new song live, but I thought the other songs weren't finished enough or would be too difficult to rehearse at that point, but Dark Horizon was simple enough.

The intro track was an afterthought just to make the EP's symmetrical in structure, but I love how it ended up. It's basically a sample of the E-Bow in the beginning of Z. which is reversed and treated with delay which is feeding back and becoming darker and finally making noise. After that the result is reversed again, so basically you hear first the noise, then the faint echoes which become gradually stronger and finally form the first E-Bow note of the song.

Meanwhile, (understanding) was planned long in advance to be a prelude for Dark Horizon, but adding the singing of my great-grandparents came about much later. It was much of an experiment, as it needed to be pitch shifted, but it works really well and the end result is even more spooky. The track also contains slowed down samples of the lead guitar harmony of Dark Horizon, taken from the demo. I could have re-created it but I didn't remember how I slowed it down so I decided to just use the demo tracks.

Thematically, Tides of Blood II is more about peace or death in everyday life whereas the first part is about war. More personal than societal. It's like having a large panorama of filled with death and then zooming into a small point and making a new large panorama of that.

As you may have noticed, Tides of Blood I begins with the same sound as Dark Horizon ends with, suggesting a circular play. Similar sample treatment was added between the end of the first part and the beginning of the second part as well. You could loop it forever and have it flow perfectly, or you could start at Brute Force Majeure or Valediction of a Victim. There's a lot of options for different track listings.

equipment

TIDES OF BLOOD PART I (2015)

released

6th November 2015(free download, CD)

story

The seeds of Tides of Blood were planted back in the end of 2011 when I was planning on the track listing for Tacit. I had just discovered the new “Mastodon tuning” (dropping the lowest string to G#) and written three riffs with it. One of them became “The Unknown Known”, one became “Brute Force Majeure”, and one is to be released on Tides of Blood II. Those two latter tracks were planned as well to be released with Tacit, but I knew there was still a lot of work to be done for them, but eventually there was many reasons to leave them for future release. The album would have become too long and also the idea of making Tacit an instrumental album started to sound really fresh.

So after the release of Tacit you may have thought there would be no more CRP tracks with vocals, but actually I knew all along the next record wouldn’t be instrumental anymore. In early 2012 I started completing Tacit but at the same time I had a stash of new ideas processing on another thread in my brain.

“Brute Force Majeure” was initially shorter in structure, it jumped directly from the opening clean guitar into the heavy riff of the second verse, kind of a more boring version. However, most of the other parts were in place almost as they are now.

I can remember vividly walking in Stockholm in April 2012 and coming up with the high bass riff which kinda lead naturally to the next soft section. I remember coming back from the trip and going straight to the rehearsal space to demo it up. The same session also yielded another song idea which may or may not be completed one day.

For “Brute Force Majeure”, the tom-tom buildup was the final missing link. I kinda felt I was breaking down the song in many ways, but building up the tension for 5 minutes works surprisingly well.

In late 2012, after Tacit was ready for release, I was again able to start working on new stuff. I remember sitting in the office at my day job, coming up with a bass riff high up the neck without even having an access to an instrument. Then I came home and quickly demoed it on a guitar just to remember how it went, and came up with another, more droning riff. That became “Beyond the Line”.

Both of these two songs are over 10 minutes long, but actually consist of only a handful of riffs played in different versions, whereas older long songs such as Soil Sacrifice had more parts that had nothing to do with each other. This riff-varying technique is obviously inspired by the band Tool.

“A Thousand Hollow Words” was a riff I came up with in 2009, when working with The Last Season. I made a quick demo, just the first two parts with main guitar, bass and drums - and thought it sounds too much like something else and ditched it. Then I re-discovered it again in 2013 and decided to try to do something with it. The whole heavy part was composed later. I’m not sure if it would have made it to Tacit, had I discovered it two years earlier.

I had a vision of how Tides of Blood would sound. Big. Huge. Articulate. I also had some ideas of how to implement that. I wanted to record the drums in a studio for a proper room sound. I wanted to play the rhythm guitars into multiple amps at the same time. I wanted to use a professional mastering engineer. In the end all that succeeded, but the cost of the articulation was that all the little mistakes in my playing were no more able to be hidden.

Tides of Blood became really tough and time-consuming to record. I thought I'd record all the guitars and basses in a weekend. Turns out I only got the bass and half of the rhythm guitars. Every day I had to set up the twin-amp system and tear it down at the end of the day because other people were using the space as well. At many times I questioned myself doing all this voluntarily, but the end result is very rewarding.

Tides of Blood was originally an album, an hour-long monolith of material. I knew it was too much. I was bouncing between the long album, a double EP, a triple EP or shorter album with a short bonus EP combinations, but in the end went with double EP.

I was frustrated looking at playing statistics which showed that people would listen less and less the further the album went, with the closing tracks always getting the least plays. If we look at Tacit, The Unknown Known was probably the track I spent the most time and effort on, and not everyone listened that far?

I know that Spotify and mp3 players with high capacity have changed the way we listen to music. When I went to high school with a portable tape or CD player, I would only have a couple of albums with me, and I did not skip any tracks, because otherwise I would run out of music too soon. Nowadays you have access to everything and you can just skip whatever you feel like, the music never runs out.

Finally I found a way of splitting the material into two EP's. They would be similar in structure, both having their own theme but also making a bigger wholeness when combined. Both would also have two long songs with vocals, a closing instrumental, an intro track and an interlude track. Tides of Blood I would get the more progressive and noodly material, whereas part II will be more about straighter rhythms, slow doom riffs and post-rock elements.

The old guy singing in Finnish in the beginning of the EP is my great-grandfather whom I never even met, as he passed away before I was born. One of his sons recorded the singing on his reel-tape machine back in 1963. He found the recording a couple of years ago and transfered them to CD. I got to hear that and instantly knew I wanted to do something with that. There’s a huge emotional load in the singing, and it totally fits the mood of the record.

The theme of Tides of Blood I is war, and it’s not even hidden that much. Why are people so passionate about their home countries when they have rarely actually seen the borders? Is it that different on the other side of the border? If there are war crimes, then some things in war are legal? There is actually rules in war? Why can soldiers be moved on the battle field like pieces in a chess game? Why do we feel numb about hearing thousands of people being killed but still are crushed when a loved one passes away?

equipment

TACIT (2013)

the unknown known

We cached our lives behind the wall of glass
The memories decayed
Now what remains is all the things we do in tacit ways

released

3rd January 2013 (free download, CD)

story

Having released three albums and one EP in mostly the same style, a break of cycle was needed. I also knew that there was no sense in trying to top the epicness of The Last Season. First I considered making an ambient EP. Then I progressed into the idea of adding drum machine beats, but no real drums. Finally I ended up making arrangements for drums like before. There just wasn't much space for vocals. The idea of an instrumental album finally started to feel good, even though I ended up adding one vocal part.

Many of the songs were stemmed from old ideas that were left in the drawer for years, for a whatever reasons. Some of the riffs never found their way to a typical long epic CRP piece. For this album, simpler song structures were very welcome.

In the end, Tacit was still a lot closer to a normal CRP album than I initially thought, but still different enough than the previous stuff. Actually you could call it a “back to the roots” album, since in the very beginning CRP was all instrumental and half-ambient.

Tacit is a theme album, like CRP albums always are. It tells a sci-fi story in the form of instrumental songs. The story is about the rise and fall of a super computer called Colossus. People load all their information into the memory of it and let their own memories decay. But what happens when Colossus crashes one day and all data is lost?

The recordings started in July 2012. I wanted to put some effort into the guitar and bass sounds. I borrowed a Mesa 4x12” cabinet for the guitar sessions. While this was a superior choice for the sound quality, it meant a drastic change for my working methods. In the past I was using preset sounds which meant I could record a part whenever I had a time or do punch-ins later. Now any of that wouldn't be possible, because the sounds would change when I'd move the microphone. I tried to record all the guitars in one day, knowing that I wouldn’t have the same sound the day after. I ended up re-doing some parts from the beginning to the end because of some minor mistakes, but it was all worth it.

For the bass I went even further. I packed up my recording gear and drove 200 km to the city of Turku to the rehearsal place of the band Nauticus (whose album I produced) and used the awesome bass gear of Juuso, their bassist. That meant having a selection of three tube heads and four big bass cabinets and dozens of pedals. We settled for Juuso's Monster bass head and Matamp 4x10” cab. And of course I played the beautiful Rickenbacker bass, which bruised my arm pretty badly because the shape of the body is so different than on my Jazz Bass.

Juuso also features on the album, doing the Sunn o))) -style bass blasts on Lost Mnemonics. I wanted him to create the sound and interpret the chords. He screwed up switching off the fuzz on one of the chords and it made the most beautiful noise, and it was a definite keeper. Again, all the bass tracks were recorded in one evening, and I even drove back the same night. This time, nothing had to be re-done.

The sole vocal part of the album, near the end of The Unknown Known, was initially supposed to be just a growling part through vocoder, but it didn't sound quite right. I ended up singing the harmonies of the vocoder and driving them through the vocoder as well, while also letting some of the dry vocal tracks bleed through. It made a really unique sound that was exactly what I was going for.

One thing that has remained constant within CRP since the selftitled is the tuning, drop-B on all songs. This time there's some variety. On Mercurial, the lowest string is tuned up to C#, making it essentially the Black Sabbath tuning, standard intervals one and a half step down. Meanwhile, for The Unknown Known (and Green Rainshower from the Mercurial single) the lowest string is dropped all the way down to G#. It's a tuning style that Tool and Mastodon have used. Basically it's like having a seven-string guitar without the E-string on it. That tuning is inspiring, and will probably be used on future CRP material.

Tacit marks also the first time I didn't do the artwork by myself. While I've used free photography sites in the past, this time I had a vision for graphics and didn't feel like able to make it by myself. Juho Leppänen of the band Betrayal at Bespin had helped me with the CD pressing of The Last Season so he was the first person I asked for help on the design, and was able reproduce my visions. He also designed the inner and back sleeves of the CD cover, which are amazing.

equipment

THE LAST SEASON (2011)

released

23rd May 2011 (free download, CD (sold out))

story

The song material was pretty much finished in late 2009, just before the sessions for Do You Ever... were about to begin. This explains the short gap of nine months between the two albums.

This album brings the keyboards to the forefront right from the get-go. Since the live band now had a keyboardist, parts of songs could be based on keyboards and still be played live. Guitar-wise, while Do You Ever... had a dogma of no metal riffs and no post-rock build ups, this time I went full-on with both. Meanwhile I tried to avoid composing parts that were reliant on rhythmic delay.

Recording sessions started back in January 2011. The bass was recorded direct on my Pod X3 which split the signal into direct and amp modelled sounds, while I had done the split previously in the DAW and effected the bass with plugins. For guitars, I was using my Monster almost exclusively, but I was able to keep the cabinet and mic in the same spot for the whole recording time so it was almost like using a preset - I was able to do punch ins without the sound being noticably different. I also used the Fender Deluxe for some clean parts.

The rhythm guitar sound of The Last Season consists always of two tracks. One is the Tokai Breezysound Telecaster with the Bad Monkey pedal for a bright and punchy sound, whereas the other is the Gibson SG through the Rat pedal for a fuzzy and bassy sound. These two sounds complement each other nicely. The Tele was used also on many clean parts, while my Tokai SG was used on some parts in standard tuning. That guitar just shines on octave leads. I also made good use of a capo on some parts. I bought my Roland Space Echo while finalizing the mixing of Do You Ever Think... so it got used only on few parts on that album, but this time I almost over-used it on guitars and keyboards. Another prominent element of the album is the E-Bow, a post-rock cliché used before this in only one CRP song.

The album has a number of guest musicians, all of them reproducing sounds I visualized for the songs but could not reproduce by myself. The violin parts especially turned out amazing, lifting the album really to another level. Meanwhile, I was planning to get some turntable scratching on Moraine just before the vocals start. I had a guy to do it, but he never showed up with the material, so I just abandoned the idea.

equipment

guitars

DO YOU EVER THINK IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD? (2010)

released

11th August 2010 (free download)

story

Since I was writing songs faster than releasing them, I was well ahead of time on this album. I'm pretty sure I had a rather completed demo by the May of 2009. The lyrics may not have been there, but all the music definitely was. The drum recordings were done in January 2010 but the rest of the recording was delayed by many reasons and the final product wasn't out until August.

First I recorded the guitars direct with the Pod like always. Having bought an awesome Monster amp, I wanted to get its sound on the album and started re-doing the guitar tracks in June. I ended up using half of the original direct tracks and half of the Monster tracks. Usually in the big riffs there's a direct track on the right speaker and an amped one on the left. Most of the clean sounds are also amplified, but some of the leads were left as they were. On The Reclusive Road and The Ship, I used my Fender Deluxe combo in the place of the direct tracks.

The guest musicians' parts were the afterthoughts of this album made in the last minute, but they really were the spice it needed, although saxophone, cello and female vocals seem to be the ultimate clichés of post-metal music.

The theme of the album can be interpreted on many levels, but in my mind, the emphasis is not on "it's the end of the world" but on "do you ever think". I was coming up with fictious persons and trying to make up stories for them facing their personal end of the world in the form of song lyrics. The only exception is the track Permanently, which is based on school shooting incidents in Finland in 2007 and 2009. Meanwhile, the song Hibernate jokes off at my own day job as a computer programmer by using lots of computer jargon with double meanings in real life. At the time of writing the song, I was working too much overtime and sometimes wanted to just go to a hibernate mode along my computer after the work day.

The song Negative Photosynthesis was considered for the album in an alternate track sequence, where Hibernate opened the album and The End of the World was the second to last. It would have been an interlude before the latter, but after the sequence changed, there was no place for it, so I decided to save it for later use. For a reason or another, the song The Last Season wasn't even considered to be worked on, at least not that I remember, although it was almost included for 852 the year before.

This was the first time I wanted to make a some sort of an official web release for the album. I bought the domain www.doyoueverthinkitstheendoftheworld.com and made a website to function as a virtual album cover. The result was surprising, the album was downloaded so heavily that my hosting server died. I resorted then to bandcamp, which immediately became the new home for all the free CRP material. At the time CRP was just my bedroom project, it was natural to just post the songs online for free. Many people asked afterwards why I give my music away for free, or why I don't have a label behind me.

equipment

852 EP (2009)

released

22nd July 2009 (free download)

story

Most of the 852 songs were written in early 2008, right after the s/t songs were written. Hostile Environment was the first one. It's basically very similar to the tracks on the s/t while the two others have a little more experimenting going on. At the time, I was trying to get into black metal and some of those influences can be heard on some chord progressions like the chorus of Hostile or the heavy riff after the post-rock part in To The Bottom. The song The Last Season, with different lyrics and slightly different structure was written also around the time and was considered to be the fourth song, but for a reason or another was left off unfinished.

The recording sessions were pretty quick. Drum sessions were on the 4th July, while the finished product was released just under three weeks later, on the 22th! Everything was well prepared and still at this point I didnt care of album releasing procedures, I just uploaded the songs online when I got a mix I liked. Later I was disappointed with the quality of the growls, as well as one guitar lick I forgot from To The Bottom. I noticed it while test listening to the mp3's I had just released, facepalmed, and decided to live with it. I still play the correct version live though.

Around the time of writing the songs, I was getting heavily into keyboards. I had just bought a Nord Electro and a Roland Juno-106. I also downloaded a demo of Arturia's Minimoog V and used it on Hostile Environment during the trial time of the plugin. My ethics include using no pirated plugins, but then again, I've reverted mostly to freeware ones. The keyboard parts were still pretty subtle and the song structures would never rely on them, although the CRP live collective was expanded by Jani on keyboards around this time.

The theme of the album was based on the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in 1994 near Finland. 852 people died in the disaster, hence the title. Lots of controversies showed up in the investigations, and it also fired up a lot of interesting conspiracy theories. All these points of view to the incident are discussed in the lyrics - the reality, the controversies and the conspiracies.

equipment

CONSCIOUSNESS REMOVAL PROJECT (2008)

released

(as Promo 2008) January 2008 (free download)
3rd May 2008 (free download)
(re-mastered) August 2010 (free download)

story

Before 2007, CRP was all instrumental, guitar based, and a lot softer. I don't know where the idea to update the sound came from, but I do remember writing the song that made the change, Tear. I came up with the main riff and vocal motif while riding my bike from the university in August 2007 and immediately demoed the whole song upon reaching home. I hadn't really recorded growling vocals before, but I just went for it, and had a mix done by the evening. Unconscious followed the day after, and the other songs later during the fall. Exhale was a song that was left over from Blood on our Hands, a metalcore band I had with Artturi, Vesa, Ville back in 2006.

The songs were recorded in two sessions. In the first sessions in December 2007 we attempted at all five, but only From Wound to Scar (always abbreviated FTW within the band members) and Inhale/Exhale were good enough. These two tracks were initially released under the title Promo 2008 and sent to some magazines and labels. It was reviewed in Soundi. The three remaining tracks were recorded later in the winter and finished around May 2008.

The way of working set a blueprint for all following CRP sessions to come. First I would do a demo of a song with computer programmed drums, then Artturi would learn that, we would record the drums and then I would re-record all the instruments based on the real drums. At this point, I was being very cheap so for example all guitars were recorded direct via a Line6 Pod XT Live, the bass was effected just with plugins and the keyboards were all VST plugins controlled through MIDI. This also made it possible for me to record everything except the drums in my bedroom.

These six tracks were always meant for the same sequence as a lyrical concept, so they were married together on a s/t pseudo-release. The tracks were just uploaded to the internet with a vague cover image - a close up taken of my lava lamp sometime in 2003. Later on the Promo 2008 tracks got slight changes to the mix and all tracks were remastered for a re-release for bandcamp in 2010. Also, the cover photo was slightly re-mastered by adding the name on the photo.

equipment