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Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Back at the mixing board

While our livers were still recovering from celebrating the biggest social event of the millennium in Scandinavia, the engagement of Sweden's princess Victoria, the party alarm went off again. Prodigy's new album "Invaders must die", sampling our heavy sausage anthem "Salami Fever" jumped straight to number one on UK album charts. Oh yeah!!!

Last weekend the Pepe band did a quick trip to Tallinn, playing with the wonderful guys of Kosmikud at the club Tapper. In the meanwhile our man in down under, boi had returned from a tour and recorded vocals for our tune called "Science, The People's Friend", doing once again an excellent job. Can't wait to get my hands on that.

3 instrumental mixes are now ready and I've started working on the vocal mixes: there's a LOT of material to go thru as this time we have actually recorded 2 different choirs.

J.S.

2:22 PM

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Sunday, February 22, 2009

Will your son become a ballet dancer too?

Yesterday we went to see Sweden's wonderful gift to the world of psychedelia, the mighty Dungen. A great gig, it was so exciting to enjoy a rock band where all the members, including the drummer, are singing. Plus they had the coolest looking lights technician I've ever seen!

One of the (many many) main ideas on the upcoming album is combining seriously mad drumming with elegant baroque classical music. We realized that we might actually be on to something when we found out that the results of a study from the University of Hertfordshire have just revealed that the overall fitness of ballet dancers is greater than that of international swimmers. The work, led by Professor Tim Watson and Dr Andrew Garrett, involved comparing members of the Royal Ballet and English National Ballet School with a squad of British National and International Swimmers, including members of the Olympic squad. So it seems that classical music that you can groove to (sort of) is good for you!

J.S.

6:01 PM

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Saturday, February 07, 2009

Nazareth, NYC and Home

It's been a very busy week, vocals for 8 (out of 15) tunes are now in the can. Still waiting for material from the Nightingale of Boston, Chris Cote...who is on a holiday and is rumoured to be the ruling Karaoke King of Bequia after his fiery performance of Nazareth's "Love Hurts" at the local Karaoke bar.

New sessions photo's, including pic from the Pepe NYC outpost, Paul's Manhattan penthouse finally uploaded. And do also check out the "It's Cookin' Vol 1." at

http://www.myspace.com/itscookin

Among other tunes the compilation contains the super rare Pepe tune "Home", our first "progressive" composition and still one of my personal faves.

J.S.

9:27 AM

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Saturday, January 24, 2009

Winter Vacation

All the lyrics and basic vocal ideas for 15 tunes ready and sent to The Talent (TM). While the singers are desperately trying to find at least some kind of a melody hidden somewhere deep inside my mystical mumblings, I'm heading of to Lapland for a one week of snowshoeing, ice water swimming, cross country skiing and other form of voluntary torture.

J.S.

P.S. More session photos uploaded!

10:11 AM

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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Hmmm ...

Lyrics written for 13 songs, 2 more to go, wheew! The backgroud research has led me to question various things ... like before the Flood, what animals Noah did NOT bring into his ark, and were he and his family REALLY vegetarians ... "these dinos are starting to get on my nerves, hmm I wonder what they would taste with some beans and butter?" Who's to tell?

J.S.

11:55 AM

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Monday, January 05, 2009

It’s just begun

Happy New Year! During the holidays I did some fun traveling in time and space by first enjoying Steinbeck's "A Russian Journal", followed by de Beauvoir's "America Day by Day". Both written in late 40's and offering extremely interesting glimpses of USSR and USA during the first years of cold war. Both countries believed that they held the key to the future happiness of the human race. What I found really fascinating was that while the average standard of living was so much lower in USSR, the conditions poor people (especially poor blacks) faced in USA were just apalling. Highly informative and recommended reading!

During the last few days I've recorded the first Golden Karaoke Hits (aka "vocal demos") and straight after The Talent (TM) and their ears recover from these sonic shocks we gonna start recording the vocals.

J.S.

3:00 PM

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Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Merry Dimension-X-mas!

Time to take it easy for a few days, read a lot of books, try to hide from depressio hiemalis (aka "winter depression") as we still have no snow in Helsinki (and we haven't seen the sun since ...umm..erm ... was it October?) and collect material for a tune called "Streetcar Racer".

The sound scientists of ArcAttack from the home of singing Tesla coils sent us a wonderful Xmas present: they finally had time to record some material for the new Pepe album! Hopefully I can upload some photos and a video clip next week.

J.S.

7:39 AM

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Monday, December 15, 2008

Electric pens on fire!

This dusty old brain of mine, warmed by working on Husky Rescue lyrics (the new album is R-E-A-D-Y !!!!), is now running on overdrive. As they say in the beginning of Conan the Barbarian: "Before the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Arias..there was an age undreamed of...". Yip,the new Pepe album is gonna be a concept album based on two metaphysical books about life in Atlantis (and on Venus), virtual reality heavens etc. written in California in late 19th century.

Paul's been recording new bass lines for various tunes and I've been "borrowing ideas" and writing like mad: so far we've got lyrics for seven tunes. While some of the new material is actually quite a lot less tongue-in-cheek and maybe even a bit more pop-oriented, it will not be less crazy than stuff on S T M. It's just that once again we wanna do something a bit different.

J.S.

3:46 AM

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Sunday, December 07, 2008

Independence Day

We've been celebrating Finland's Independence Day by banging the hell out of vibraphones and marimbas with McGyver. Mc's always up for a challenge but I guess there's a line between a challenge and frustration ... of trying to double weird melodies created with modular synth arpeggiators. I myself thought that was such a great idea!

Earlier this week I also recorded a Moog vs. fuzz guitar battle between Tommi and Mc. Check out more pictures of sessions uploaded on "Photos".

J.S.

12:02 AM

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