A bit on the process of this album, in case some of you want to know. Skip it if you don’t dig it.
Making music has been an important creative vent for me to let out excess steam. I became more active in pointing my energy towards it three years ago through becoming a parent. Automatically letting go of not super important or outright unnecessary time-consuming things helped me focus on the one personal creative passion I had.
This weird shitstorm of a year made me do that same thing again. Social distancing, fear for the safety of my loved ones, scary and absurd stuff happening in the world, forced change of life and life style, my immediate reality shrinking into a space smaller than ever. All that helped me vent my creativity, frustration, fear, joy and a mixed bag of other feelings into this thing that I released today.
I recorded the ghost piano at its home, which is also my wife’s family home in Northern Ostrobothnia, Finland, during one windy afternoon in July. These recordings became the backbone of the five original songs. Building layer upon layer of sound on top of that helped me find what was the meaningful and important part in each. In my way of working with sound, that usually ends up in a theme or set of notes stripped to their bare minimum. Just enough that it conveys a feeling but so that it can be endlessly repetitive and scarce. During the course of four weeks, the songs were ready. Or at least ready enough for me.
In September I contacted my hit list of amazing artists I wanted to collaborate with on these particular songs. I can’t stress enough how lucky I feel to have found this bunch of people. It’s been emotional, in an already emotional time.
So, this album consists of at least these ingredients
- an old Hellas upright piano in need of tuning, but tonally capable of fm-like subtly dissonant things that please me a lot,
- two compact modular synthesizers consisting of mostly ALM Busy Circuits and Mannequins modules
- a Teenage Engineering OP-1
- a Novation Peak
- some field recordings from Northern Ostrobothnia and Berlin
- an Elektron Analog Heat and some Meris pedals
- a Tascam 424 mk3
- Lots of constructing and reconstructing in Ableton Live
- five amazing remix artists
- one amazing mastering guy
- a supportive, understanding, and loving family
- this pandemic motherfucker that keeps wreacing havoc
Ask me if you want to know more, I’m happy to elaborate on things.
Love you all,
— Jukka
