INSOMNIUM blog: syyskuu 2007

keskiviikko 26. syyskuuta 2007

24.9.07

I woke up seven minutes before check out time. My head felt several sizes too small, and there was a horrible taste in my mouth. I had clothes on, so anything really dangerous couldn’t have happened. Hotel room looked like it had been decorated with a satchel charge, every loose item turned inside out. We had done some wrestling during our “rest”. Four hippies, five empty wine bottles and 70 empty beer cans. Hotel staff had called the police only once, so I guess we had been relatively peaceful.

We hit the road, and I slept all the way to San Antonio. We arrived little before Katatonia, so we had time to check out the venue. Cool place, good PA and large backstage. The Swedes found their way to us and we did the load in and gear set up procedure with routine. There was a luxurious liqueur store just across the street, and naturally we took full benefit from its presence. Nick took us to some steak house to eat, and hangover was cured with a giant T-bone steak.

We spent the last remaining hours before the show just digesting those beefs and doing some rehearsals. Everybody had still small hangover due to last night, so we had to put some extra effort to get into right mood before the show.

StS pulled their show through with solid professionalism, and we got our turn to convince Texas with our Scandinavian knowledge. We weren’t too sure about ourselves before the show, going to stage felt like ascending to scaffold. But gladly our suspicions were in vain. Venues sound engineer did his job very well, clear and distinctive stage sound made it easy for us to master the stage. And so we did. Yet again by the end of The Killjoy everybody was head banging and cheering. Tonight we did Bereavement instead of The Day It All Came Down just to keep Markus from having heart attack. It went well, Aleksi laid some solemn orchestrations during the instrumental section before the solo. Everybody was on fire, both on and off stage.

After the show the evening took its natural course: chilling at the backstage and making some acquaintance with the exotic jewels we bought from the store across the street. Merchandise sales are good and Finland outplayed the Swedes easily tonight. They have had their moments, but according to my notes the score is now 16-3 for Finland. Gladly this tour isn’t a national ice hockey game, so we can’t loose this tournament at this point. Some vodka drinks till the venue closes, and then nocturnal ride to Dallas. Two days left to go, piece of cake. “Menee huikalla”, as Mikko would say.

Quote of the day: “It’s pudding time children” -Primus

The White Rabbit

Daniel setting up the drums

Way to go

Sexy Niby

Katatonia's guitar tech, Brian

Budding time

uliuliuliuliuli!!!!

2 liters of vodka did its job

Ville V.&F./INSOMNIUM

23.9.07

Day off. We drove as far as Nick was able and then stopped to town called Forth Stockton. Little town in the middle of endless pampas, only one grocery store, few fast food restaurants and service stations. We checked into a motel and rested the whole day and night. We had nice, easy-going and peaceful evening. Not.

Quote of the day: “Bääää” –everyone

Forth Stockton

Budding time!

Sexy Alexy!

Cheers for that

Naama kyljyksillä piste moi

Ville V.&F./INSOMNIUM

22.9.07

We woke up at 9:40. We had showers, breakfast and did some tour managing via e-mail. We had a shitty breakfast at McDonalds, hopefully the last on this journey. Then again the luxury of travelling: 11 smelly baboons in a van, HIM on stereos, 400 miles of torching sunshine and rotten humour. We lost an hour crossing a time zone, so we arrived in Albuquerque just half an hour before the doors opened. We set up our gear quickly and StS did brief sound check.

Initially we were little sceptic about this place, would the Hispanic people of New Mexico understand anything about Scandinavian metal? We hit the stage, and all our ill suspicions evaporated. The crowd was really enthusiastic and the whole show just went off in a blast. It has been few days since I had this fun on stage. Sound engineer really mastered his job: sound was brilliant both on stage and in the audience.

It goes without saying that everyone was in a good mood after the show. Two Finnish fellows had come to see our show. They were reporters doing a documentary about their road trip on Route 66. We did an interview for Finnish national TV-channel in the tiny backstage of Launchpad, Albuquerque. Surreal.

Nick had to get some decent sleep before driving again, so yet again we had some time to kill. We spent it just hanging around, having some Buds and marvelling the Saturday night fewer in Albuquerque. We saw an interesting event, Hispanic and black people had a group fight on the street and a group of five policemen came to break up the riot. Well, all that fits somehow into the narrow field of Finnish comprehension. The attraction was that the police were horseback riding. We were sitting in the patio when five giant horses came galloping down the street just in front of our eyes. A sight you won’t ever catch in Finland. Later in the evening we saw those five Nazguls again and hailed them with respect.

There was a mutual feeling of brotherhood, respect and loving among the Insomnium pack this evening. Last hour before departure was spent solely going through all cool events we have encountered on this journey and praising each other. The atmosphere was very warm and intimate. Well, just to gain some contradiction StS boys tried a bit different approach. They had a huge yelling contest, which ended up in some beating and strangling. Gladly the argument was solved few minutes with no casualties. The funny thing is that nobody remembered what this fight was about. Peace returned to Albuquerque and we were ready for Texas. It’s four o’clock in the morning, another cosy night ahead in the van. Good night.

Quote of the day: “Vittu mie rakastan sinuu!” –Insomnium
“Oot siekin kunnon mulukku!!!” –Swallow the Sun

On the road to Albequerque

Ville V.&F./INSOMNIUM

21.9.07

We arrived to Phoenix at 8am and looked up a motel near the venue. There weren’t many choices, so we picked up the cheapest one. Probably the trashiest joint we’ve been to, but still the security arrangements were very tight. So, no hippie smuggling this time. We were quite worn out after the night of travelling, so we just took showers and headed to bed.

The morning number two draw for us at 1pm. We hopped to van and drove off for breakfast. “Breakfast” in some local Taco place soon turned to lunch. Well, it was afternoon after all. We ended up being stuffed, and ready for load-in. It’s hot here, almost 40 degrees of Celsius. Way more than the misanthropic Norsemen can handle…

Venue was ok, some kind of bar and restaurant in the front and good stage in the back. Backstage resembled a cleaning closet in every aspect: small, smelly and no catering. Well, we can put up with anything at this point of the tour. Almost. We set up our gear and did some line-checking. Mikko and Jämy were still enjoying each other in the hotel (see the Russian Green Mile –document), so StS was reinforced by Daniel and Christian during the sound check. That turned out to be quite fun, but still I prefer the original line-up.

We had some vacant time on our hands, and it was spent strolling around the Phoenix downtown. There wasn’t much to see, only office buildings and some lunch cafeterias. And as it happened to be Friday evening, the whole place was desolate. We were looking for a grocery store, but found none.

As we headed back to the venue there was already a queue on the street. So we had some kind of expectations. StS pulled a great show and gained new fans despite the horrid sound produced by the sound engineer. We hit the stage after them. For some reason this wasn’t our night. There was nothing wrong with our playing, but audience seemed to have frozen up. We encountered one of the sound engineers special abilities: lottery monitoring. The stage sound was different in every song, varying from bad to terrible. Well, we did the best we could and left the stage with mixed feelings.

Spud left the tour two nights ago, he got some bigger assignment and naturally took it. It hasn’t affected us at all, but Scar Symmetry and Katatonia now lack tour manager and sound engineer. That was the major pitfall tonight. Sound guy blew three subwoofers during SS’s set, and the mix was something from the other world. I couldn’t tell which song was which. Things got even worse during Katatonia’s set. Brian was running up and down the stage, trying to make the chaos somehow listenable. Well, Katatonia pulled a best possible show in those conditions. Tomorrow things will be better, hopefully.

We did the load out and headed back to motel. Some guys were boozing, but I was weary and headed straight to bed. I think some parts of Arizona were still left unconquered. Well, tomorrow is another day. We’ll be back, some day.

Quote of the day: “No, onko Matilla ollut sepsistä viime aikoina?” –anonymous guitar hero

Brickhouse

From inside

hippie

Experimental lineup

Phoenix

Water sprinklers for cooling the air at restaurants

Local taxi

Bright sky

Break in the park

STS:

On road to Albuquerque

Ville V.&F./INSOMNIUM

lauantai 22. syyskuuta 2007

20.9.07

I woke up before the alarm clock went off, luxury on this tour. We checked out and headed for breakfast. Chicken kabob, the corner stone of healthy and nutritious tour diet.

We had some vacant time on our hands, so we headed to central Hollywood and played tourists for a while. The main boulevard is just like any other tourist attraction, crowded and swarming with beggars and all kind of merchants. Well, we bought HIM’s new album from the Virgin Megastore and just fooled around for couple of hours.

At noon we headed for Long Beach. There was this T-shirt guy that Kai knew from Rotten Sound era tours, and he had worked through the whole night with the shirts. The guy turned out to be very nice and polite grind core –fellow, and he had done an amazing work. There were 200 handmade quality T-shirts done single-handed over one night. We sealed the deal with gratitude and headed for Corona. Now we’re doing all right with the merchandise, at least for couple of days.

This was the shortest distance to cover on this tour, so we were in Corona in no time. We had dinner in the venue and just chilled out the rest of the afternoon. There was a laundry service just next door to the venue. We did something like six machines of laundry, and ended up being nice and clean. Now we’re good to go for the rest of the tour.

There were two local support bands. First one was some kind of doom/black metal. They had extremely funny corpse paints, and the music was also very entertaining. We laughed our asses off. The sorry thing is that they were very serious about their music. Black metal should be left to Scandinavians. Or should be left undone altogether. Period. Well, the second support band (Dark Haven) was good, actually the best local support we’ve had on this tour. So you Americans still have hope ☺

If we were little rusty yesterday, all that was now forgotten. We had a really good show and the sound engineer made it a pleasure to perform. Crowd was good, little bit funny that they had a mosh-pit going on through the whole set. Well, we didn’t play any epic songs tonight, so I think they got what they wanted.
Everybody was in good mood after the show. As a little surprise the venue (Showcase Theatre) didn’t have a bar, so we had to drop by at local liquor store to get some oil for our machinery. Rest of the evening was spent in relaxed and happy mood. When the time was ripe we Finns did the load out, enforced with Scar Symmetry’s stern bass player. If you want to catch a Swede carrying anything besides a beer can, that’s the guy you should be looking for. Great guy and a good musician he is.

We spent last moments in Corona by hanging out with some true fans that had come to see us. There was one Vin Diesel –looking guy (Anthony) who had seen all our east coast shows and now flown to California just to see us. That kind of dedication leaves me into state of bewilderment. We chatted for a while and parted saying “until the next time”, truly meaning that. I hope the next time will come soon, as far as I’m concerned we should tour US again next spring.

Mikko got some Jack Daniels and Vodka from the Swedes, and we hit the road for Arizona. HIM on stereos and Jack Daniels streaming. I was soon asleep.

Quote of the day: “Jumala armahtaa, pakoputki ei.” –Nekro-Sukram

Doing some laundry finally, god forbid...

Weary musician

Assembly all over again...

Heija Finland!

Ville V.&F./INSOMNIUM

perjantai 21. syyskuuta 2007

19.9.07

Wake-up call was at ten o’clock. Check out went surprisingly smoothly, considering that there was an apocalyptic hangover looming upon us all. Well, Nick was in shape, the rest of us weren’t. We spent some time going through yesterday’s events. Scariest story of the morning: Jämy and Matti had been sleeping in the same bed, and Matti had been nearly raped by our drunken and home-sick guitar hero. Or actually I wouldn’t call it “rape”. On tour it’s just “surprise sex”.
We hit the road in an hour and had breakfast at some truck stop at the outskirts of the city. So long Las Vegas, you won’t be missed.

The drive through desert took about six hours. Yesterday we received bad news about the merchandise, we have already been running out of stock and now our label informed that they are unable to provide any t-shirts for the rest of the tour. So the journey was spent solving that problem. Luckily Kai knew a cheap shirt factory at Long Beach, and after about 50 SMS and phone calls the problem was solved. Aleksi prepared some designs with his laptop and we worked out a deal for t-shirts.
We made only one stop at some abandoned service station. Now I know what the “Hills Have Eyes” -movie is all about…

We arrived in Hollywood just in time for load-in. We made acquaintance with the legendary Whisky A Go Go –venue briefly and then just strolled up and down the Sunset Boulevard. I booked hotel rooms with Niilo at a motel just across the Sunset Boulevard Guitar Store, poor musicians purgatory.

I had dinner at a sushi restaurant and we marvelled the city for a while. We dropped by to have coffee at Rainbow bar, and saw Lemmy from Motörhead. Just our kind of place! By the time we got back to the venue it was already packed. Four local openers played Tetris on stage with their backline. We hanged at the backstage, replacing guitar strings, rehearsing and trying to get in the mood for the show. I was playing guitar on the very same bench where Jimi Hendrix had OD’d few decades ago. Still, I couldn’t sense the glamour. Maybe Las Vegas had taken the sharpest edge of us.

StS had a great show, and we hit the stage after chaotic 5 min change-over. Playing went smoothly, but we had a shit load of technical problems on stage. Monitoring was pure horror, Niilo’s wireless was giving some white noise to monitors and my amp wasn’t functioning the way it was supposed to be. So this show didn’t feel too good. The crowd was great though, they were cheering already during the intro and there was a mosh-pit going on during all the heavier songs. I was quite overwhelmed by the feedback we got, people seemed to welcome us well and had enjoyed the show despite we hadn’t.

Kai, Mikko and Aleksi were on party mood again, and they got pretty wasted pretty fast. The rest of us didn’t feel like partying, we did few interviews, met some fans and just lingered at the backstage. Fans seemed to be quite different in Hollywood compared to rest of the states. There were those true music fans as well, but also a load of shallow dwellers just hanging around and trying to get into the “inner circles”. By the end of the evening the backstage was swarming with random people just running their mouths. I wasn’t in the mood to enjoy that, frustrating people all around.

Katatonia pulled a great show, and we started to organise the load-out. Last nail to the coffin of high spirits was that Katatonia’s bus driver had passed out at some hotel, and we had to carry all the gear across the Sunset Boulevard to the bus. The sober Finns did the job as the others enjoyed Hollywood. A dozen of 200m rounds with backline on our hands and the job was finally done. It took another hour to organise the high-spirited ones to get to van. Mikko and Kai had been partying at the Rainbow club. They tried to make acquaintance with Zakk Wylde. I guess their sophisticated social gestures were misunderstood somehow, and they were kindly guided out of the club. Finally we got the pack together and I was more than ready for bed.

We sneaked to hotel room in silence and I headed straight to bed. Last thing I heard before catching sleep was an anonymous Finnish drummer yelling at the hotel corridor. “God damn, those fucking Russians! I’m under siege here! Where the fuck is Jämy? I need to go to toilet or I’ll fucking kill everyone!” The basic “good night” -conversation.

Quote of the day: “Tuommosta kinkkua kun sais maistaa niin ei paljon tarttis jouluna syödä!” –anonymous nearly raped bass player