Kotiin haltiakansan luo

It's yet another summer solstice and time for a new album.

For the past four years I have been working on this. The philosophy behind the album goes again deep.

The world we live in today is full of readymade things. Quick food, disposable fashion clothes, the latest and "best" plugins and synths... Cheap furniture, houses that are in a demolition state after 40 years of use, crappy products that break down and degrade our culture and thinking are abound everywhere... People want everything fast, there's no time to wait. You have to be productive, efficient, beautiful strong and young. If you don't feel like that, surround yourself with products that make you feel like that, and maybe other people believe that too for a moment.

What is the position of the electronic musician in a time like this in our culture? What am I thinking when I write music?

First of all, almost the whole album is created with free software. Except for EnergyXT, Renoise and a few VSTs, all the plugins are freeware. Also, many of the sounds on the album have their origins in my own samples. I have built a mass of acoustic instruments over the last years, and also spent dozens of hours sampling the Finnish nature, my blacksmithing workshop, and just about any other place I could think of. So self-made spike fiddles, flutes, drums, finger pianos and you name what are behind the sound of this particular album.
I'm completely for supporting developers that you like, but I am even more for the production and distribution of free tools. Especially for the non-professional who can't spend a lot of money for the equipment, it's never been easier to build a 100% audio workstation. The world is full of used and discarded PCs, and even with something that's years old, it's possible to do things that people could not imagine twenty years ago.

Also I chose not to use any commercial sound libraries for this album. Sure, you could buy/pirate (did I mention I don't use any pirated software?) the latest sounds from MOTU, Spectrasonics or whoever. And sure they would sound good, because it's the best musicians and studio engineers whose work you're getting. Thousands of hours of it... But you would sound like everybody else. Maybe it's just me, but hearing the same sounds over and over in movie and TV soundtracks these days is a bit like eating processed food. It's maybe fine, but it's the same thing one day after another...
So I wanted to go beyond this, and chose to build and sample my own instruments. Maybe the loops and sounds on this album are not of the same pre-built high quality than on 99% of electronic music albums that use acoustic sounds, but at least it's my OWN sounds.



(I have built many, many more instruments that did not make it to this album, see pics here)

Also, I have spent considerable time working on the polyphonic harmonies and sometimes atypical modal scales that the tunes use. Because I'm not a professional or trained composer, making a two part counterpoint melody takes maybe ten times longer than just writing the (for the genre) typical monophonic leads. And if I add a third part, it might take twenty times longer... And so on. So in this way I believe that the music is more interesting than typical modern trance, where you hear the same boring scales, arpeggios and one-finger leads everywhere. I hope to take this development even further in the future, but progress is slow because I'm working almost by ear alone, just like all other folk musicians around the world.

So considering all this, I feel safe to proclaim that I have really created an electronic folk album, even though the music might not sound like what people typically think of as "folk" music. Of course it's a kind of individual folk in the way that this is not music of the people, and there is one specific creator for all the tunes. But if there is interest, I might try to export MIDI files out of EnergyXT so other people can maybe build on this music and create their own interpretations.

Considering the mastering: I didn't want to have that kind of super sleek studio sound that is popular these days. So I was quite careful with compressors, limiting and such, and always checked each individual track in the multichannel mix very carefully to check that the dynamics of all instruments are not flattened. So the music does not sound as loud as most other releases these days, but that's for a reason...

You might notice the album is NOT free. You can choose to pay 0 euros, but that's still a price in my opinion. If you think the music is worth nothing, or maybe you are just short of money and can't spare a few euros, you can choose to pay nothing.
But, since living in this material consumer state requires money, even if you happen to be a poor do-it-yourself hippie philosopher, I hope people do pay for the album... If for nothing else, then for the reason that the less time I need to spend in crappy low paying jobs, the more time there is for writing new rad musix ;)

So, without any further ado, I welcome you back home to the elven people:

(a note about downloads on Bandcamp site: you have to sometimes wait quite long before the download starts,
on my computer even a few minutes for some reason. just wait, the download will start!)

Oh, and if enough people donate so that I can collect around 600€, I will press a retail-quality CD, and everybody who gave some sensible amount of money will get the album for free!

You can also transfer money if you have a Moneybookers account, just throw the funds at kim.ake at your favourite Google owned mail address. (Sorry, had to rephrase the address like that to throw spam robots off. AVP fights ev1l robot empire you see?)

For EU citizens or people without credit cards/paypal it might be easier to do a direct bank transfer,
the information is as follows:

IBAN - FI2821332000060501
Account holder name - Kim Åke
SWIFT (not necessarily needed!) - NDEAFIHH

Or for Finnish people, just Nordea 213320-60501/ Kim Åke

Thank you! We already have a nice start for the album, at this rate it will take still some time, so please keep donating so we can make a real physical pressed professional CD a reality too!