Soundi article translation

Thank you: sineresi

IN A STRANGE AUDIO LANDSCAPE

Ville Valo and Marko Annala are in the middle of a creative period. Both are currently working on songs for their respective band’s seventh album. Soundi mixed things up by switching the songwriters’ iPods for a few weeks. Did it open strange new doors? Did the shy look of the muse’s eyes get a new glow?

Ville Valo studies with interest the black iPod delivered to his door. The content of the 60 GB device makes him smile.

- Ooh, good stuff. A lot of familiar albums I haven’t heard in a while... Rytmihäiriö. Which album..? Oh, one of the newer ones. Okay. And some Rattus, too. This could belong to someone from Tampere. Maybe the singer of Ääritila [Lasse Aaltonen a.k.a. Laturi, also known for the band Riistetyt].

He continues to pensively look through it dropping other names and excluding unlikely candidates.

- I don’t think it’s the Nosferatu of Nakkila [Herra Ylppö]... It could be someone from Oulu as well.

The soul of HIM is one half of Soundi’s experiment where two musicians anonymously exchange iPods. In a few weeks, they’ll meet and compare their experiences.

- On the other hand, there’s this Erkki Junkkarinen department too. Hmm, yeah. Good stuff for the road undoubtedly. And it points to the Lappeenranta gang. Could it be Hynynen [Jouni Hynynen from Kotiteollisuus]..? Even from Napalm Death there are only the albums with Lee Dorrian... The Finnish hardcore always points to a certain direction. Oh. Meshuggah. Hynynen might not have that... It’s probably one of the guys from Mokoma. One of Pätkä’s friends, that’s for sure.

The lighthouse keeper of Munkkiniemi is starting to get so close that he has to be distracted. Ville gladly starts to talk about the big work of Christopher Shy’s that’s hanging on his wall. And about another one that’s upstairs. But that’s another story.

A few days later, “one of the guys from Mokoma”, or more specifically Marko Annala, is turning in his hand Valo’s 8 GB, also black, iPod. Just like Ville, he’s making music for his band’s seventh album and is gladly participating in the iPod exchange experiment.

- Interesting music. Who could it be..? Maybe Jori Sjöroos. Or Ville Tuomi. Or Jyrki69 or Jussi 69. It’s hard to say. I don’t think it’s a metal musician, but rather someone who plays pop music but also likes metal. The ratio between the two genres is the exact opposite of the one in my iPod.

Marko returns to the issue with text messages. The first one reads: “The reggae is throwing me off because the goth and black metal are exactly what you’d expect. The only metalhead I know that also likes reggae is Ville Valo, but I don’t think you would have talked him into doing this.”

And so also the other participant has guessed right. Because I have to rudely ignore the message so that Ville’s identity isn’t discovered too early, the Mokoma frontman sends another message a day before the meeting: “After Ville, my strongest guess is Joa from Sara, but if it’s not him, it’s still a musician born in the 80’s. And a singer-songwriter.”

After about two weeks, Marko is walking down the nave of the Tampere Cathedral. His face breaks into a wide I-told-you-so smile when he sees Ville who’s making faces for the camera. Ville had wished that the pictures for the article would be taken at the cathedral because he’s interested in the building and especially Hugo Simberg’s art in it.

The singers greet and hug each other. Everybody feels like laughing. The look on Ville’s face says that he’s also glad for guessing right.

After admiring the architecture, the frescoes, and the stained-glass windows and posing for the pictures, we discuss the current situation of Mokoma and HIM. Annala has spent time in a rented cottage in Terälahti where he has put the finishing touches on his new songs with a method that’s uncommon for him.

- I haven’t composed songs acoustically before, but now I’ve tried that too, he says. – The guys were just there spending the weekend, and we arranged a few songs with acoustic guitars and an acoustic bass. I’ve been staring at lynx tracks and made music.

Valo and his group are a little farther along. 15 or 16 ideas are apparently in a trying-out stage, and they have even made it to their rehearsal place already.

- Gas’s first baby was born a week and a half ago, and now we have returned to our rehearsal schedule and turned the amps to position 11. It’s lovely to work on stuff in our family-like work environment again, and I’ve learned to trust more in the coincidences of a creative moment and in shared enthusiasm. It’s nicer to go to the studio when we haven’t beaten ideas to death. So that it’s not just mechanical repetition.

Annala thinks that Mokoma will begin work at their rehearsal place at the end of February. He hasn’t written any texts yet, but he sees clearly the direction they are going in. He estimates that the album will be in the stores “in the spring of 2010”.

Valo hopes that HIM will make a demo in March, go to the studio in the spring, and get the record out “in early 2010”. Selecting the producer is the next big step that he is going to go discuss with record label people in California later in the spring. The next album will not be produced by Tim Palmer.

- We have gotten all we can out of Tim and vice versa. Our love-hate relationship is mutual. You have to take a leap once in while. But we’ll find a role for Tim too; it’s probable that he will mix the album. What’s essential now is that the band likes to rehearse and everyone really likes what they are playing. Without compromises.



After taking the pictures, we move to a more earthly setting. Everyone just wants black coffee and “maybe also some soda pop”, but because Ville says he likes bars more than an average café, we head to a pub on Tuomiokirkonkatu.

The conversation starts with how they both guessed the identity of the other. The link between them is Pätkä who Ville mentioned earlier and with whom they both have recorded a long time ago: Annala with Slumgudgeon and Valo with HIM.

Marko: - I thought beforehand that the most embarrassing thing would be if it were some indie guy who I don’t really know or even recognize. I would sit here thinking who the hell is that guy. I was so relieved when I saw you!

Ville had later become a little paranoid with his guesses. He had started to wonder whether he had the iPod of someone very close to him.

Ville: - I even thought this might be Gas’s iPod. It was missing Queensryche, but otherwise it had a lot of stuff that he has too.

Marko: - It was easy to see that the owner was someone who actively updates his knowledge on music. There are a lot of guys who are our age that think that no good music has come out in the last ten years. And then certain stuff, for example Cat Stevens, Jenny Wilson and Jeff Buckley, made me think that it was a songwriter not just an ordinary member of a band. A songwriter’s iPod, definitely.

And as we saw earlier, Ville situated his borrowed device in the right geographical direction. It was in Lappeenranta where Annala started to make music, even though he has since relocated to Tampere.

Ville: - I was just certain that it was someone from Lappeenranta. Standards, challenging stuff, twisted humor. It reminded me so much of Pätkä. A little bit of the Finnhits stuff to laugh at and a little bit of pop – Kanye West and stuff – but also Morbid Angel. And quite a lot of heavy metal.

Marko: - Your iPod does say a lot about you, but I have to say that I don’t feel like a metalhead. The important thing for me is not that the music is heavy. I like all kinds of good music, it’s just that I’ve happened to find the most to explore within heavier music.

Neither of them confesses to having tried to make themselves look better; nothing has been added to their iPods for this interview. They both have, however, removed their own band’s demos and Marko also other artists of his record company Sakara Records – their presence might have made it too easy to guess his identity.

Ville: - I have a couple of other iPods as well, but I like carrying that small one with me because it has so little space. That way you have to update your selection more often. If you have too much music with you, there’s too much to choose from, and you end up listening to nothing in particular.

Marko: - I also often take my wife’s Nano that has only a couple of GBs with me when I go jogging. But the problem is that at home you think you’ll want to listen to certain stuff, and then once you get outside you curse yourself because there’s nothing you want to listen to. Last summer when I ran a marathon, I uploaded enough albums to last me those four hours.

- When you’re jogging, an iPod is good because without music you start to concentrate on your own panting and other sounds of your body. When you’re listening to music, you concentrate on that and running may get easier.

Ville: - I listen to my iPod too sometimes when I walk to the post office.



Even though both have also individual songs on their iPods, they both agree that they prefer whole albums. Annala has never used the shuffle function, and Valo doesn’t have good experiences with it either.

Valo: - I have sometimes tried it to see how it works. But it doesn’t make any fucking sense. I have sometimes been hooked on some individual songs, though. I occasionally use the repeat function pretty obsessive-compulsively. For example, Goldfrapp’s A&E is like that. A compact, perfect pop song. And I didn’t listen to it analytically or anything. It just made me feel good. I seem to be in that kind of phase right now.

Marko: - Could concentrating on individual songs be because you’re working on new songs yourself right now?

Ville: - No, at least not consciously. Right now I’m listening to Chuck Fenda’s Gwaan Plant where the message is “more marijuana we want”, and that really has nothing to do with HIM. “Farmer go and grow because we need more grass / The better the quality, the better for us / because we are rasta dudes.” That’s the chorus and the content. Ha ha ha. Concentrating on individual songs is a new thing for me. I’d also like to know what it is about. We’re really not talking about me listening to for example Solitary Man by Johnny Cash hoping for some unconscious inspiration.

Marko: - I’ve taken listening to albums so far that now I feel bad even skipping shitty intros! I still see an album so strongly as a whole that if they have put in some noise or an intro that feels unnecessary to me, I guess they have tried to say something with it. If I want to listen to noise, I rather put on for example Autechre.

Ville: - If were talking about albums, the last one I’ve really gotten excited over is Witchcult Today by Electric Wizard that has Sabbath and stuff like that in it. I must have bought it four times because my Mac laptop doesn’t read it or any other black cds. Same thing with the newest Katatonia and Cardigans. I couldn’t upload Witchcult Today onto my iPod, so I ended up buying it from iTunes. If you can’t listen to a new record you’ve been waiting for when you get home, it’s sure to piss you off. That’s the same thing that often drives people to get their music from other sources, so to speak. Same thing with the first copy-protected cds. The system actually made listening to music more difficult. It was pretty damn strange that a brand new cd wouldn’t play in your car stereo for example.

Marko: - I have very unwillingly bought a few copy-protected cds, and I remember being fucking pissed when Playing the Angel by Depeche Mode came with some player that had to be installed on your computer to be able to play it.

Ville brings the conversation back to the “songs vs. albums” territory.

- Often I also just want to listen to silence or the humming of the bus. If you’ve just played a gig and you have 600 kilometers of sitting in a bus ahead of you, the first thing that comes to mind is not blasting something like Disturbed.

Marko: - An iPod is a pretty impossible device on the road. In the Karelian yapping that goes on in our tour bus, it’s impossible to concentrate on anything, and you have to have time to play cards too. Often, when I leave to go on tour, I upload something that I assume I’ll listen to but it’s kind of like the books you pack with you that you never read.

Ville: - I have usually managed to read the books I have brought with me. Maybe the distances we have to cover are a little longer and there’s a little more time to kill while waiting around.



Both the 32-year-old Ville Hermanni Valo and the 36-year-old Marko Kristian Annala consider their iPod solely a tool. Neither is particularly attached to it or has customized its appearance in any way. Neither has modified the software either.

The frontman of Mokoma says, however, that he has turned off the volume limit of his player with the help of a friend. His colleague from HIM says he’s going to do the same. So far to blast music he has had to get out his oldest iPod made before such limits existed. The only more unusual program he says he uses is iPod Ripper.

Annala remembers that he got his first iPod “in 2004 or 2005 because I used it to listen to the demos of Kuoleman laulukunnaat”. Valo says he got “the very first model as a gift” from his friend, the American professional skateboarder/jackass Bam Margera “in 2002 if I recall correctly. The capacity was probably 5 GBs”.

The devices fulfil their intended purpose at the moment, so a switch to an iPhone for example doesn’t interest the men. Marko doesn’t want to “create more waste into the world all the time”, but he also finds a more specific reason for his choice.

Marko: - First of all, I’m waiting for another operator besides Sonera to start to sell it and for it to develop technically a bit.

Ville: - I’m scared of having all the technical appliances in one. I don’t like that you combine a phone and a camera and a music player. When one of them breaks, you can’t use any of them.

These attitudes are reflected also on how they view additional appliances.

Marko: - In Mokoma, we often think in a pretty communist way, so we have bought a docking station together for our rehearsal place and our bus. You have to follow some kind of ecological thinking.

Ville: - I have different… docking stations – the term always makes me laugh because “docking” has it’s own meaning in adult entertainment… if you’re not familiar with it, go find out. In any case, I must have five of those. When the first small stations came out, I bought a few just to try them out. We were on the road a lot back then and they felt like a good idea. But the lower frequencies suck. Especially with reggae they didn’t work at all. They were those cheap Altec Lansings and JBLs. And they all sucked.

- Then the first Bose docking station came out, and the bass worked in it as well. It was the wall-like model that weighed a ton, but it reproduced the lower frequencies well. Thankfully the new lighter Bose model finally has an “aux in” plug that I missed in the older one. Even at home I usually play music with AirTunes nowadays, which means that the iTunes in my laptop is running and I direct music to the room I want through it.

Ville says he’s listening to cds less and less. As an internationally touring musician who spends dozens of days a year on the road or in airplanes, he has noticed that many others are doing the same.

Ville: - If we get back to life on a tour bus, iPods have really revolutionized the whole thing. I don’t think anyone wants to return to the days when you dragged with you 120 cds without covers in those Caselogic suitcases. You always ended up pouring beer on them and all kinds of other shit. When you got back home, you always had to throw some of them out.

Why it is the iPod that has become the standard mp3 player and the most common model, the men don’t really know. They think one reason might be because it’s easy to use, another one being the design aspect that Apple has always been good at.

Marko: - iPod is like Pepsodent, Turun sinappi [famous Finnish mustard brand], or Aurajuusto [famous Finnish blue cheese]. A brand name that you use even if you’re not referring to a Mac appliance. In that sense, the branding of iPod has been very successful. I once borrowed a Creative player, but I didn’t like it. Nor the Sony tube-like device that I have even owned. Adding a screen to these gadgets was a pretty big thing. And when I found iPod, I didn’t have to look for anything better anymore.



One of the ideas behind Soundi’s iPod switch experiment was naturally that the musicians would find new points of view and stumble onto previously unknown artists and bands. Annala has listed Jenny Wilson, Silversun Pickups and CKY from Valo’s selection. The last one he confesses he has previously ignored with the thought “I know they suck without even listening to them”, but he has now changed his opinion.

Valo says that Annala’s music library made him experience several “retro flashes” that made him promise to himself that he will get reacquainted with artists he had for some reason forgotten. The list includes Faith No More, Steve Vai, Satyricon, AC/DC and Soundgarden.

- Goddamnit, Badmotorfinger is a great record! Ville enthuses. – Down on the Upside and their gig in Helsinki around that time left such a bad taste in my mouth, that it ruined Soundgarden’s older stuff for me as well. Which was of course totally unfair. I also remembered what an amazing singer Chris Cornell is. It’s pretty demanding listening to Cornell on Badmotorfinger because he sings so fucking well.

Both still like cds as objects and haven’t become regular customers of iTunes or other mp3 download sites.

Marko: - I really only use iTunes if I can’t find samples of interesting music on for example MySpace. I just bought one song from Carly Simon’s new album.

Ville: - First of all, I have to say that I don’t get Steve Jobs or whoever the hell it is that runs the iTunes store. If there’s such a thing as a “world wide web”, why can’t I buy for example one song as a gift for a friend from American iTunes? What is the point in that American iTunes has totally different stuff than European iTunes?

- The latest thing I’ve downloaded is the new The Crying Light album by Antony & The Johnsons because there is nothing in his album covers to make it worth buying them. That’s it. But on a principle iTunes pisses me off so much that I’d rather not use it at all.

The more sensitive download sites have become familiar only out of sheer necessity.

Ville: - I have always had a rule that if I download something illegally, I also buy it legally. I have done it with a few reggae albums, one I Killah and one Dub Judah. I also looked for Seed of Memory by the interesting British artist Terry Reid at one point for so fucking long that I ended up downloading it illegally. Later I found it on Amazon.com.

Marko: - I have the same attitude. I do it only if it’s virtually impossible to get an album legally. And even then I burn it on a cd and put it on the shelf. Kind of like reserving a spot for the real album as soon as I get my hands on it. I did it with Tulus’s first album that I borrowed and burned. Silent Hill soundtracks and the solo albums of Trey Spruance who was in Faith No More and Mr. Bungle are really hard to get in Finland, so I have agreed to burn them from borrowed albums. But I don’t even know what I should do if I had to go look for a place to illegally download the new Kanye West album, for example. I would be completely lost.

Ville: - I know it a little too well. I once looked for one Paradise Lost album for a long time when I was in a hurry to get it, and it seemed impossible to get. Then I went on some torrent site and after a few clicks and an hour’s wait, I had the whole production of Paradise Lost on my computer. That’s pretty gross. I was thinking: what the fuck. These guys have worked for 25 years, they have released albums and toured all over the world, and then everything they have ever released can be gotten like that for free. With one click. In a shitty quality, but still. Then I ordered the records from some internet store and went on a tour. It was nice to come back home and find the records on my doormat. Then I uploaded them onto my iPod in a better quality.

Ville thinks this is an interesting topic of conversation to study people’s sense of morals.

- Some new band whines that the record company doesn’t support their work, but at the same time they illegally download all the music they listen to. It’s a vicious cycle. Or let’s take the guy who plays the guitar and whose band dreams of a record deal, but because they have illegally downloaded all the music they have ever listened to, there no money going around. And record companies have no money to sign new bands. People are pissing in their own pants out of stupidity.


The quotes:

Marko: “Certain stuff, for example Cat Stevens, Jenny Wilson and Jeff Buckley, made me think that it was a songwriter not just an ordinary member of a band. A songwriter’s iPod, definitely.”

Ville: “I was just certain that it was someone from Lappeenranta. Standards, challenging stuff, twisted humor. A little bit of the Finnhits stuff to laugh at and a little bit of pop – Kanye West and stuff – but also Morbid Angel.

Ville: “I don’t get Steve Jobs or whoever the hell it is that runs the iTunes store. If there’s such a thing as a “world wide web”, why can’t I buy for example one song as a gift for a friend from American iTunes? What is the point in that American iTunes has totally different stuff than European iTunes?”

Marko: “In the Karelian yapping that goes on in our tour bus, it’s impossible to concentrate on anything, and you have to have time to play cards too. Often, when I leave to go on tour, I upload something that I assume I’ll listen to, but it’s kind of like the books you pack with you that you never read.”

Ville: “I have a couple of other iPods as well, but I like carrying that small one with me because it has so little space. That way you have to update your selection more often. If you have too much music with you, there’s too much to choose from, and you end up listening to nothing in particular.”