Autumn leaves

My girl and me went out today to get some good old fresh air. Better to see some nature in weather like this than to rot on the couch. It´s so cool that we only need to walk ten minutes to escape the concrete jungle. Rock ´n´ Roll rampage in front of our door, hippie heaven just around the corner. Can´t get any better than this! Now I let the pictures talk, hope you enjoy the autumn´s Sunday feeling.

Bates Motel? 

Autumn in all its beauty.

Finland´s 1st president lived in Villa Kivi, the house on the left. On the right you see the Dome.

In the distance thrones the ferris wheel of Helsinki´s amusement park.

This post is dedicated to Peter Steele, who loved the autumn and died way too early. Rest in peace.

ON HEAVY ROTATION:

Not their best but the most fitting to this season

In-A-Gaga-Da-Vida

Well, eeh...oops! What was that?! Seems like I wound up working as stagehands for Lady Gaga last Thursday night at Hartwall Arena. We were quite a big bunch of local roadies but were all allowed to watch almost the entire show for free. I wouldn´t have paid for it but free of charge? Come on...of course I checked it out! It was real fun to see us bearded mid-thirty guys with Motörhead shirts, Misfits caps and Entombed patches among all these überstyled teens and twens. By now I maybe don´t have to explain anymore that this kind of music ain´t my cup of tea but I never disliked her stuff too much either. Plus I think there is something about her. In a way she´s a modern Madonna, talent combined with lots of shock-value and all. The show was BIG and explained the huge number of my collegues. Let´s see...we had a full band, five backround singers, twenty dancers, podiums, staircases and a glowing cube on stage, a giant monster fish, a catwalk into the audience, lots of neon signs, video projections, all kinds of props, a subway car replica, a real Mad Max style car and plenty of gay pride with sexual undertones (or overtones?). Ah yes, and she changed her outfit at least five times. I don´t know if you need all this but with todays kids, maybe you do. Just four musicians on stage? Boring. No glitz, no glamour? Zap to another channel. This was a video game and Lady Gaga pushed the buttons on her adoring crowd. Did a lot of propagaganda, too. She thanked her fans to an almost unbearable extent (at one point I saw her enormous face on one of the screens and wondered if I really saw tears in her eyes), she encouraged them to be proud of themselves, no matter from where they are or what they are or bla bla bla and talked a lot of unity talk. Pathetic, yes but hey! Message and attitude were thin, perhaps even calculated but alright! Rather that than some ungrateful fuck on stage who doesn´t communicate at all with the fans. Very few get away with that.

The Gagamobile leaves Hartwall Arena. 

What did the trick for me was seeing her perform a song alone, just playing piano and singing a slow ballad. Again lots of talking in between (she ridiculed and definetely eliminated rumors she would lip-sync) but that was the part of this whole extravaganza where she showed that she is a really good and talented musician. It was also the calmest part that proved she doesn´t need the circus around her to appear good. But to avoid confusing the teenagers who need explosions and five different things happening simultaneously to feed their ADHD they at least set her piano on fire. What a laugh...

CONCLUSIO: I am not a fan now but I am convinced that Lady Gaga is one of the good people. Whoever is a fan of her and/or her music has my blessing. Not that I think anybody would care...

POST SCRIPTUM: We packed and dragged her shit into the trucks until 4am.

Revelations 11:10:10

And I looked and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was the Killing Joke, and hell followed with him. I´m still in awe of their great performance on Monday, it was truly breath-taking! The band celebrates the 30th anniversary of their first album released in 1980, they are back in original line up with a new record and they convinced (I swear) everyone at Nosturi that night that they are still a force to be reckoned with. But let me start from the beginning.

I had never been in Nosturi until then but walking by that impressive crane (=nosturi) a couple of times before I always thought about how well the whole scenery fits a Killing Joke show. You get in the right techno-fearing, tribal man vs. machine mood already outside of the venue, just perfect. Nosturi has two floors, a restaurant on ground floor and they have all kinds of happenings going on there. Concerts from mainstream to extreme, art exhibitions, theatre plays, you name it. They also provide 40 (!) rehearsal spaces in the basement. I was told the building is even set up with a retractable roof, so if an event demands and the weather conditions allow it, they open that roof like a tuna can and you will literally see stars during a show or party! That wasn´t the case now but trust me, you don´t want that to happen in a Finnish autumn night. And it´s definetely getting colder now...

Zakk Wylde´s little brother? I don´t think so.

From inside Nosturi turned out to be a real cool place, too. We went up to the second floor where the show was about to start at 20.15. There is a club that is small enough to create atmosphere and intimacy, but still big enough to hold a good crowd. When support act Kotiteollisuus hit the stage at 20.15 sharp (sharp!) the place wasn´t too filled with people yet. Given the fact that the show was sold out some of those missing people must have had better things to do than watch the biggest selling rock act in Suomi play. And I bet there were better things to do. Their set of 30 minutes felt like an eternity and the music was utterly and mind-numbingly boring. They focused on their harder material only as if they had something to prove. Desperately trying to come across like bad-ass rockers the band had one big problem and it was a crucial one: No ideas to speak of. Their set was like one long song and that song just wasn´t good. Ei kiitos.

Then Killing Joke finally made it up to us for the long wait. I´m not only talking about the 45 minutes it took them to come on stage after Kotiteollisuus, which I thought was a bit nerving. KJ were supposed to play here already on April 29th, I would have seen them in Germany even before that, namely on the 23rd of April. But the whole tour was postponed due to timing problems with the release of their new album Absolute Dissent, and this meant waiting for half a year! KJ didn´t want to tour without the record being released and their show pretty much answered the question why. That brings me directly to the "downside" of their gig, so let´s get it over with because the rest is gonna be praising!

I already guessed this would happen. What songs is a band going to play that has put out 13 incredible albums but ALL members of the current line-up have only recorded two of them together, the first and the latest that is. Exactly! They played six songs from their debut and nine new ones, eight of the latter in a row! I didn´t mind the old stuff, on the contrary I enjoyed it very much. Maybe I shouldn´t whine about the many new songs, they are damn good, but I only knew three of them. My obsessive-compulsive disorder is to blame that I only buy vinyl records and Absolute Dissent is still not out on LP. I was hoping to purchase the wax at the merchandise stand only to find no records at all, which was quite a bummer. So for one part of the show I was rather listening than raising my fist and yelling to my fave tunes. And why they didn´t play Endgame, the teaser (and goddamn hit) for tour and album, will always remain a riddle to me.

BUT: They still were so fucking great, you just can´t argue with class! The quar... eeh, quintet (with keyborder Reza Uhdin) was on a great mood and you felt instantly that they had a really good time themselves, something I regard as very important. Who wants to watch bored musicians on stage? Thought so...

Jaz Coleman. Pure energy.

Coleman is maybe not for everybody´s taste with his theatrical performance, starring eyes and gestures soaking with symbolism (?) but there is no way the man leaves you cold. He has an incredible stage presence and he can sing like an angel and scream like the devil. Jaz Coleman is one of my fave singers, hands-down. The typical conspiracy-theory preaching part between songs was maybe a bit much, but...hey, I was done complaining. Kevin "Geordie" Walker is one of the most underrated guitarists in rock history. That guy is a one man orchestra, an army of one. No pretentious solo wankery but riffs to mesmerize and memorize. Absolutely no-one sounds like him. He was standing there, grooving a bit (not too much) to the music, puffing away cigarettes (an offence any other musician except Lemmy would get lynched for in Finland) and churned out riffs with ease any other string-bender would sell his or her soul for. What a cool motherfucker! You see why he´s one of my fave guitar players? The lost sons Youth (getting bald, hehe) and Big Paul Ferguson were great, too. Youth quite obviously enjoyed himself and was moving constantly all over the stage. Big Paul still has the beat and it was great to see him perform Love like blood,  the band´s biggest commercial success that is so far from sounding commercial that it´s pure joy! When they played The Wait and Pandemoneum at the end of their regular set all hell broke loose! KJ said their thank yous to a first patient and then very grateful crowd with three encores and I bet they would have played even more if there wouldn´t have been a deadline. It was truly a show to remember and I´m glad I was there! Amen.

Killing Joke killing Nosturi

Make sure to check out:

www.killingjoke.com (again!)
www.kotiteollisuus.com (to make up your own mind)
www.elmu.fi (Nosturis homepage, choose your language)

The wait

...is over by tomorrow!

They are playing at Nosturi, the show is sold out and I will see them!

At Last!

SONG FOR THE DAY:

Killing Joke - The Wait

Kahvia ja pullaa

The evil twins of temptation!

Coffee and buns - curse or blessing?
I´m not able to decide but I can´t get enough of them, that´s for sure. And you find them everywhere, because the Finns are full-blown coffee addicts. Just take a look at what the statistics say: In 2003 every Finnish resident consumed an average amount of 11,4 kilogramms of coffee. That means that each Finn gulped down 4,8 cups per day. This bare fact puts them in world wide pole position, they are the masters of mokka, the coffee champions with esprit for espresso! The Krauts in comparison are not that hot for coffee with only 2,8 cups per day and person. All of you who think that the low German consumption is a result of their constant beer drinking I will have to disappoint: according to the same statistic that hot juice made from beans makes it before beer when it comes to Deutschlands favorite beverages.

Germany has a reputation as the promised land of bakery products and rightly so, this centuries-old trade has spawn a huge variety of goodies and tidbits. But let me call out: I DON´T CARE! I found my promised land here in Suomi because cardamom is what I dig and cinnamon is what I crave! Both ingredients are used a lot in Finnish bakeries and I love it. My fellow Germans connect the taste mostly to christmas, that´s the time cinnamon usually finds its way into teutonic dough. Here you have it all year long so it´s christmas every day, ain´t that nice, kids? My absolute favorite is the Korvapuusti which means "slap in the face" or "Ohrfeige" (recipe linked below) and I must limit my gluttony if I don´t want to morph into a member of Poison Idea (R.I.P. Pig Champion).

By now I´m drinking so much coffee that a friend already told me I would be close to becoming a real Finn. I would applaud to that if my hands wouldn´t sh-sh-shake so m-m-much. As mentioned before you will find kahvia ja pullaa almost everywhere but especially in sommer time the nicest place to enjoy them is one of the many outside coffee places. This year´s summer was historic with the highest temperatures in Finland´s written history (37,2 °C, global warming anyone?). Many have hold me responsible for that, accusing me of having brought that incredible heatwave from Germany to the country, maybe in my suitcase? Or maybe I put the sunshine in a condom and swallowed it, only to give birth to the hottest summer of all time on a Finnish lavatory. But wait, I lost my train of thought...Ah yes, I was getting at this: The weather has been more than nice, also the beginning autumn was rather mild so far with lots of sunshine. I really wonder when the shit hits the fan over here and the cold comes creeping in. Many, many days were just perfect for a coffee break, sometimes at the seaside, sometimes in a park or on a terrace. Dear suomalaiset, your coffee culture rules and I´m your biggest fan!

An inviting kahvila on Pohjoisesplanadi. Who can say no to that? I can´t.

How to make korvapuusti:

www.food.com/recipe/korvapuusti-finnish-cinnamon-rolls-428065