There's an earlier blog entry on this particular track so do scroll on and check out that one. This one actually has some of the samples mentioned there.

The version is taken from our Clandestine (Mis)take Two demo, recorded in 1991. For some reason we wanted to remake most of the material we did for the Clandestine demo a year earlier. The line-up at the time was Jana, Vince and Reeta.

If I'm not horribly mistaken, this is the demo that Epe and Petteri at Poko Rekords heard, and decided to sign us. (Actually we didn't sign anything since we thought the alleged DMode and Mute Records way of just making a gentleman deal based on trust rather than paperwork was rather cool. Some copied their hair, wardrobe and tunes - we copied their legal procedures. Damn we were nerds.)

Anyway, after this we found ourselves on Poko and started violating one deadline after another, managing to squeeze out one release per year for the next four years. So we're lazy or bi-polar or perfectionists or possibly d) all of the above, you be the judge.

So we can have more than six tracks now, that's nice. With steps like these our whole back catalogue will be here by 2042 or thereabouts... Oh yes, Force Majeure was written, appropriately, for the Force cd. Can't remember whether either name had an impact on the other or which came first. Lyric-wise it's pretty self-explanatory, really (now sing along: I could explain the words but I really can't be bothered...) Reeta sang the female vocals, of course.

Well Advanced Art turned 23 yesterday, and apparently just gets slower with age. Not that we were terribly quick to start with.

Compilation is still no further than it was a year ago. Well, I suppose it should be called Archive 85-08 now, instead of ending at 07. It's good to have some progress.

I've mentioned before our first birthday and the circumstances leading to a band being born. One thing that has *not* been mentioned is that we had a cool metal dude in our early line-up as well: Santtu aka Niko from Finnish metal gods Dethrone was supposed to play with us but eventually we never played gigs or recorded anything with this formation. Took a couple of embarrassing band photos, though. Santtu was a great lad and fun to hang around with; he wanted in because he was a big Duran Duran fan. I'm sure he appreciates me revealing this.

Oh, and thanks to our myspace pal called "23" for - quite possibly inadvertently - reminding me of this joyful occassion which might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Just uploaded the 1988 demo version of "Steel" for two good reasons. One, the tape was released in August 1988 which makes it two decades old. Two, I noticed we only had five tracks on OurSpace even though six are allowed.

Anyway. The demo tape was cleverly named "Advanced Art" (we were kinda low on imagination at the time, apparently) and it was our first commercially released tape. The term commercially sounds bigger than it was - a set of tapes was sold at the Darklands shop, run by our old pals Jyrki and Anne of Two Witches. The cover had a nice pic of Jack in The Shining ballroom scene.

The tape was sold out surprisingly soon and we felt rather guilty as it was technically far from what we wanted to sound like. In fact Vince did the master mix live from 4-track while the tapes were being copied. And no, we wouldn't pay for another 50 tapes just because he forgot to open a couple of channels here and there for a few seconds...

A guilt trip. Yes. But encouraging at the same time: people did buy them. The earlier tapes were only given to friends. Some are still talking to us.

Steel is the only Advanced Art track ever for which Vince wrote basically all the lyrics so I won't even try to explain what it is all about.

Some versions of this track feature Vince's cool black fretless bass. A bass which, I'm afraid, I pretty much ruined the one time I played it live. I can't really play bass, you know, but I used it on one DAF-ish track just to create noise. So most of the time I just mangled the poor instrument with my metal snake bracelet and thought "wow, cool, this sounds just like the beginning of A Day by Clan of Xymox". The strings were not too happy for that, or Vince, for that matter. But there are certain sacrifices one needs to make for art's sake. Preferably with other people's instruments.

Well not really as such but it’s damn hard to come up with short clever subject lines (that’s why I came up with that instead).

Anyway, I just uploaded our back catalogue on last.fm and made them available as full-length previews. In other words you can listen to *all* the tracks that we’ve released on cd and vinyl. The tape stuff will remain in the archives until we figure out whether those will be used on compilation or something foolish like that.

Go. Enjoy. Leave comments here and there. Spread the word. And please tell me if it doesn’t work (I’ll make sure to blame the servers and whatnots though it’s probably my fault).

Two decades ago, on March 3rd 1988 Advanced Art played the first ever gig as Advanced Art. Hands up who were there. This event, rather uncelebrated in most history books, took place in Tunneli, Tampere, Finland. Tunneli no longer exists. Not sure if we do. I'll try to dig up and upload some cool b+w pics of the event. We look rather cool in most of them. Won't upload the ones in which we don't, of course.

Anyway, we'd hosted these cleverly named Black Celebration club nights and decided to go live with this one. And the easiest way to gather an artist line-up was of course to hire our own bands for the job. Advanced Art was the main act I suppose, performing last and all, but we also provided a rather artsy project called DD in which Vince took care of machines and Reeta, future AArt member, sang. The other resident dj Jyrki of course brought in his Two Witches (I played the synths for Two Witches on this gig. I suck. Apologies to those who were present at the time.) and Northern Finland semigoths Russian Love who would become the first "outside" signing for Jyrki's Darklands label. They were quite possibly the most talented ones out of the lot at the time but we made them play first just to clear out the guitars and other lame items from the stage.

Yes, we had played live before for a couple of times but as Authorized Version. (Ok, hands up who were on *those* gigs.) The live line-up was a random act in those days. There was myself, Vince, Pete and Auten. First I think it was Vince who said he didn't want to play live but take care of sounds and live audio engineering and tech stuff blah blah. So Authorized Version live was me, Pete and Auten. Or me and Pete if Auten didn't feel like playing live at the time. Then Vince decided he wants to play live after all (a good choice, he was always very energetic on stage and broke things and/or himself) whereas Auten said he didn't want to play live but take care of sounds and live audio engineering and tech stuff blah blah. Damn these artist whims.

To cut a long story short - which I didn't, actually - we appeared on Live Celebration as Advanced Art, and the band line-up was me, Vince and Pete.

(These blog entries are becoming a bit like wall plaques on old buildings, aren't they?)

Some people kick off new year with new stuff, we just go for the new old stuff.

"I am the labyrinth" originally appeared on "Force" cd. Remixed versions found their way into "Elektrauma" sampler and this sampler tape released by a Finnish label Plastic Passion. They still exist and they still have a great attitude, so if you have spare money to spend, go ahead and spend it on these nice people and their releases.

The song itself, well, I hate to explain my lyrics and here I am, doing it again. This probably started with annoyance, as many things do.

There are people who like to appear deep, complex and profound. Yes, you know the type. They'll dismiss your feeble efforts of simple human communication just to uphold the image that there's something very unique, special and wonderful about them once you really get to know them (and it's not going to be easy because they are just so damn deep, complex and profound).

I have no time nor interest to figure these things out. So go act difficult somewhere else. (And the song works better expressed in first person, doesn't it? Makes me seem so damn deep, complex and profound, doesn't it?)

For the trivia fans: October 13 is the official birthday of Advanced Art so pretty soon it'll be 22 years from this, erm, event. (By an amazing coincidence it is also the day when our "ten year mission" was terminated in 1995.)

On October 13th me and Pete met Vince for the first time, in the unfortunately named Funking Shop in Tampere. The connection was made thru a mutual friend; we were expecting a blond guy with "a Brian Setzer haircut" but since it was a very rainy day this particular feature was somewhat out of order. We managed to recognise each other, regardless.

The meeting evolved into myself & Pete mentioning the synth band we'd been planning and Vince wanted to be in it. No mention was made as to whether we actually had synths or could play them. ("No", on both accounts.)

The morale of the story: check the details before signing anything.

The least I can do is to announce this here too: a big thank you is well-deserved by my pal Kimmo who defied insurmountable odds and dug his way thru a pile of tapes to transform noisy pieces of obsolete tech into shiny new mp3s. (To put it less dramatically: he converted our old demos into a more accessible format.) And it only took a few years! :)

It's been a fun and an eerie feeling listening to some of those old recordings. Some are way better than I remembered. Others, well, perhaps not so great. It might have been a good idea to try a second take on the vocals. At least sometimes. Let's see if an odd pick here and there would make a fun addition to the compilation, whenever it'll be completed.

(Kimmo, incidentally, is probably familiar to some of you thanks to being part of [Active] Media Disease and later Neuroactive. And there's a new project from him and Aku of Plastic Passion coming up, only available as a one-sided 7" single with unique 'art' on the other side. Haven't heard it yet but just for the attitude you should buy it in large quantities and save Kimmo from going back to honest work :)

Boy, did we ever get stuck with this one :) Apparently our fave track for quite a few people, "No answers" first appeared on our self-titled demo in August 88, featuring a lovely pic of Jack going nuts in The Shining in its cover. (I'm afraid we didn't ask for the film company's permission.)

Always a live favourite - well, don't know about you, actually, but it was fun for us to play it - it often ended up in the seriously uptempo bit at the end of the gig. Who would sing the backing vocals was somewhat random, and rarely known before the song started. Sometimes Vince did it, sometimes Reeta, sometimes myself and sometimes a random member of audience in the front row. I would like to apologise to the guy I accidentally punched with the microphone in Sweden - I was trying to give you the opportunity to shout out "don't ask me what to do", not to poke your eye out, honestly.

And thanks to the reviewer (don't remember your name) who said something about the lyrics making sense - unlike those of Camouflage - but that they're just not very good. I totally enjoyed that one.