28.8. DRUM FIESTA @ ASTIA STUDIO

28.8. DRUM FIESTA @ ASTIA STUDIO

Wednesday evening it was time to take crashcourse to the Lappeenranta city where the high & mighty Astia-Studio is located and Jarmo, Teemu and me stepped into the Astia timezone where the night is the new day - means long nightly working hours and sleeping the first half of the day away… Our new session guitarist Joonas Koto were already there waiting for us as he is working at the moment in Astia-Studio 2, what a nice coincidence. So, he got the honour to be our host and slave! Wednesday evening was spent on setting up the drums and microphones and having some serious sauna business. Astia-Studio is really the coolest studio i've ever visited and it have all the luxorious toys'n'stuff the poor hippies will ever need for rocking.

After a long soundcheck the "almost black album" drum sound was there and Jarmo was ready to blast his guts off on tape, and surely he did it - he is the machine man! Three days were spent on nice an' easy schedule doing some alternate takes, adjustments and producing. Teemu had some new grey hair because of the Ddrum trigger signals (..asked by mr. Swanö for mixing) didn't work as expected and he had to adjust some more and more and evermore...

…Of course we were having much more sauna business meetings with few beers and basics. The high cultural moments of the sessions were spent with some good dvd material from Rush, At The Gates, Mr. Big and Get Thrashed thrash metal history documents (Hiraxin Pena & Rumpelstiltskin Grinder!). We also found out that the VH1 classic is one helluva good music channel without so much shitty shit than other channels. Well, Vangelis and Axel F airing on music channel, not bad!?

More cabin moments...

True producing boogies goin' on!

Metal album producing tool nr. 1!

Morning music by J!

Jarmo got some food to the hippies!

OG booyas and Antti.

Bold & beatiful rhythm section in the cabin.

Iron Maidenism with Kalke.

25.8. CABIN FEVER!

The cock cabin sessions went really really nicely and well - we got all the material ready to rock for recording and 3 days in the woods made magics to the stuff and the spirits of music walked among us. Now we, as also Teemu the producer, are 100% confident about the high quality of the new material (..adult oriented death metal that is!) and hungry to hit the Astia studio to caught the magic moments on tape.

There's nine songs now ready an' willing for the album & two of them are as epics as almost 10 minutes long.. Some working titles flowing: "Aapon talviuni + Jorkan häävalssi" (Aapo's winter dream, feat. the wedding march of Jarmo), "Aapon kosioretki" (Aapo's trip of love), "Sonnin ajatukset" (Thoughts of an ox), "Kiintiöhumppa", "Eeppinen mysteeri" (Epic mystery) etc…

Some beloved "special guest spiritraisers" were visiting us on the cabin sessions and checking out the jams and accepting our new album boogies - our former bass-player Janne, our lighting engineer Olli, Wolftrap guitarist Antti and our FOH engineer on past tours / Kaihoro drummer Kalke. …But of course the main point was on having long nightly discussions about the new Iron Maiden album and hanging out with all the bats & spiders.

-Mrks

OG 5th ALBUM PROLOGUE - in the woods!

Hail to thee united OG forces,

The stars have aligned to the right places, the Finnish storms are begging more and more and the universum is waiting for this, so the time has come again for us to wake up from our coffins and switch ourselves to the studio mood, as it's time to breed & record the OG's 5th chapter of metal!

We've spent countless dark hours an' hours on composing and doing lots of pre-producing an' stuff this time for the new songs and so we're really confident and eager to get these high cultural moments on tape to be heard! It's going to the best music ever written & recorded in the planet errrr....or at least the best OG so far. The key words here are epic, massive, melodic, originality, metal!

There's also some big changes in our line-up as this is the first album with Toni "Red spear of love a ka Tsygä Ykä Z" Mäki on the low frequency department doing bass magics and also first album without our long-time guitarist Harri "puutarhatonttu" Pikka who have mysteriously disappeared and step aside from the OG crew. Well, we wish him all the best for the left hand path what he have chosen.

The album #5 will be again mixed and mastered at Unisound studio in Sweden by the mighty metal god Dan Swanö and it'll be recorded and co-produced by the good ol' true friend of ours, Teemu Aalto who've been working with us since the "Years In Waste" demo sessions spring 2004. So, the material is under the good & guiding hands!

We'll start the album sessions today as we're going to do the last pre-producing of the stuff and having the last rehearsals for this album with the whole band & Teemu the producer. These sessions will take place at an island called Munapirtti (roughly translated = cockcabin, really hehe!) in the south-eastern Finland near Kotka, where we'll be having some cabin fever, rehearsing like hell, having sauna, fishing, having sauna, "maybe" few beers, go boating to the sea & having more sauna in the middle of the woods. We're trying here to get some more old native Finnish spirit of the woods to our music as we're playing the stuff to all the trolls, goblins, owls and spirits of the woods. By the way, it isn't going to be folk metal still...

Hopefully these woods breathe evil! :)

Truly yours,

-Markus / OG

23.8.2010