while listening to a mike oldfield collection, i came across his cover of the william tell overture, a well-known classical piece by gioachino rossini. since i really like this song, you can watch it here, featuring many copies of mike:
if you want, you can listen to rossini’s piece on youtube.
after the stay in rovaniemi, we took the train back to helsinki and stayed a few days there as well. besides a concert of moonsorrow and korpiklaani, we visited some churches: the uspenski cathedral, the helsingin tuomiokirkko, as well as the temppeliaukio church. we were extremely happy to visit the temppeliaukio church when it was almost empty, which is apparently very unusual.
even though it was raining and the snow was melting, there was a lot of ice left in the harbor and rivers. here is a small impression of its beauty:
and here are some more pictures from the harbor area:
we also visited the sibelius monument, a beautiful piece of modern art dedicated to the finnish composer jean sibelius. enjoy some impressions:
i just got orphaned land‘s new album, the never ending way of orwarrior, after long years of waiting. it’s amazing! the first track, sapari, is really catchy. i’m pretty much addicted to it. i might write more about the album later, but for now, here’s the official video for sapari:
edit: apparently, century media requested to delete that video and replaced it by another version of the same thing, with a more “hip” title. great. whatever. here’s the new version:
for some reason, they screwed it up that a lot of hyphens appear in the title… whatever…
last year, some days before christmas, we attended a concert by swallow the sun in leipzig, germany, with support by insomnium and omnium gatherum. it was the last concert of the new moon tour. (no vampire shit, though ;-) ) you might know that swallow the sun is one of my favorite bands. they played in a small youth club, conne island, which wasn’t the easiest to find. but eventually, we found it. fortunately, nobody complained that i took my favorite toy with me; so this time, i managed to make some good photos.
i think that this concert was the best one i attended in 2009. ok, i have to admit there haven’t been many concerts in 2009 anyway. but nonetheless, this one was very good. the bands played great music and obviously had fun. (and: they played the giant, one of my favorite songs, in the encore!) unfortunately, the audience didn’t manage to sing “we want more” in finnish, so most sang a few times “zugabe” and then stopped doing anything at all, resulting in an awkward half-silence. but the band fortunately still came back.
now have fun watching some of the photos. if you want to know more about the concert, read someone else’s report ;-)
during the concert of insomnium, members of the other bands showed up on the stage, and equiped insomnium‘s singer niilo with a funny hat and a sign saying “korpiklaani”. he eventually removed the hat by banging his head:
during swallow the sun‘s performance, members of the other bands had fun installing a pink dildo first at the keyboard and then, later, at the singer’s microphone:
as opposed to the korpiklaani “hat”, the dildo stayed there for the rest of the concert.
in my post on wikipedia, i was complaining that the article about the chilenian doom metal band mar de grises has been deleted because it the band is “irrelevant”. hence, i thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about them. when writing the post on wikipedia, i re-started listening to them more intensely, and in fact have been listening to their two albums the tatterdemalion express and draining the waterheart pretty intensively over the last weeks.
their music is a beautiful mixture of dark, gloomy metal, intense doom, beautiful melancholic melodies. progressive elements, sometimes experimental elements, often slow, always dark. it is complex, never boring.
mar de grises is one of the bands you should keep an eye on, as they are rising and they are good.
last week tuesday, i attended the first non-classic concert this year, namely the calgary instantiation of the progressive nation tour 2009, featuring dream theater, zappa plays zappa, bigelf and scale the summit. originally, pain of salvation and another band should have played instead of bigelf and scale the summit, but unfortunately they had to pull out due to some side effects of the financial crisis. too bad, i would really have liked to see pain of salvation.
i decided to spare my energy in particular for the last two bands, and hence skipped scale the summit. the announced timing for the concert was perfect, and so i arrived directly when bigelf began to play. they were ok, but i was more waiting for the next band. and the very bad part of the evening started during their gig (maybe even before, but i wasn’t there), namely some [insert your favorite curse word here] potheads started smoking weed. it was not as bad as last year, but still very annoying. why can’t these idiots smoke somewhere where they don’t annoy anyone? at least there was no moshpit and the crowd’s density was really pleasant.
after hearing so many good things about them, i was really happy to finally see zappa plays zappa, which is not just another frank zappa cover band, but founded and lead by one of zappas sons. (not that this makes a difference to me, as i have no comparism of zappa plays zappa to other frank zappa cover bands.) i really enjoyed their performance – even though the potheads annoyed the hell out of me.
finally, dream theater entered the stage. they played several songs from their new album, but as usual also a lot older songs, everything including some improvisation and extensions, and several solo performances between the songs.
the concert was really good, even though the potheads repeatedly tried to ruin the whole thing to me. the only way to make it better would be to throw the potheads out and re-add pain of salvation (and maybe reduce to three bands, all of which can play a bit longer in that case).
i just read on spiegel online an article about britney spears leaving the stage for half an hour during a concert because of too much smoke (despite smoking being prohibited). in the beginning, the article seems to mock on her for this behaviour. i’m not a fan of mrs. spears, and she isn’t exactly an angel with respect to smoking herself, but this really makes me angry. smoky places are not just annoying, but unhealthy, and it far from funny being forced to stand smoke, in particular at concerts, as there is usually no choice of going to a “non smoking version” of the same concert. even worse, smoking is extremely bad for the singer’s voice. (okey, britney seems to do playback, but that’s not the point here.)
its really bad when at concerts which are declared as being smoke-free (mostly by law, it seems that most venue operators or bands don’t have the guts to enforce a smoking ban without being forced so by law – even though there are counterexamples, like die ärzte) someone decides that he can simply ignore this, and starts smoking. usually followed by several others doing the same. i hope that eventually times will come where the smoking bans are (more strictly) enforced, better sooner than later.
this has nothing to do with a lack of tolerance from the non-smoking side. don’t get me wrong: i don’t care (too much) what people do to themselves. but i do care what people do to me. (also see artica’s articles on the general subject.)
i just read on blabbermouth that miika tenkula, once lead guitarist of sentenced when they still existed, died on february 19th, 2009, at the age of 35. that’s definitely too young.
thanks for your music. and rest in peace, miika.
today, i saw dracula (imdb). the one from 1931. well, you might now think, “so what?” well, i did not just saw the movie on a big screen, but the more important reason – the one which made me pay CAD 52 for this show – was the score. the original movie did only had music played during the intro and the outro. until 1998, when minimalist philipp glass was given the task to write a score. he composed a string / piano piece, performed by him and the kronos quartet, under the direction of michael reisman. well, a philipp glass score together with the movie is still no reason to spend that much money – but a live performance of the score by philipp glass and the kronos quartett themselves, together with the movie, definitely is. the whole thing happend in the context of the high performance rodeo 2009 in calgary; an advertisement can be found here.
this was actually the first time i saw the movie. and probably the first time i saw béla lugosi in a movie not made by ed wood. well, it was quite funny, even though some of the dialogs were hard to follow because of the score.
anyway. this event was definitely worth its money.
i just read an article on torturing of inmates of, say, guantánamo bay and american prisons in iraq by exposing them to too loud, repeatingly played music, for example songs by metallica, nine inch nails, eminem, etc. this is really shocking, but what made it way worse was the last paragraph, which states that while bands like rage against the machine and massive attack are opposing the misuse of their music, metallica apparently likes it.
first i hoped that the article was somehow wrong, that they meant it in an ironic or sarcastic way. then, i started searching the web, and found a video interview on blabbermouth by 3sat with james hetfield from metallica and an article in the guardian. some quotes:
“if the iraqis aren’t used to freedom, then i’m glad to be part of their exposure”
“we’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. why should the iraqis be any different?”
“part of me is proud is because they chose metallica because he [mohammed al-qahtani] thought he was hearing the sound of satan”
“it is just a thing — it’s not good or bad.”
this already sounds pretty bad, but then i read this and watched the video, from 4:45 starting. sorry, but i really had to think, “what kind of idiot is this guy?!” if you compare listening to phil collins on the car’s radio for a few hours to constantly listening to the same piece of music with a very high volume for a whole day, you’re either a complete idiot or you talk without really thinking.
in any case, shame on him.
