The Finnish
gothsters are finally under pressure to create a follower to their 1997's debut
"Lumo". They are actually recording the new songs in a wonderful
surrounding: an old Villa lost in the middle of nowhere, Pori, among Finland's
woods & lakes !
There, where
calm and silence are the only lows, new songs are borning and are promptly
immortalized into digital recorders !! The band will enter a "proper"
studio then, at a later point, to add vocals and mix-down the whole sins. We
actually had some anticipations, and expect a quite much renewed sound since
their previous effort.
Songs are
rather more dynamic and catchy, somehow even "commercial" to a
certain extent. Now, please read what Jukka (the hyper productive master of
Divine Grace's sound !) wrote about this first recording session.
"The Avantgarde &
Wounded Love orchestra"
About
recording sessions, well we have now all guitar, synths and drums ready. I have
to record bass guitars still here in Sauvo so we will have all background stuff
ready for 10 songs.
We'll
continue with Hanna's vocals in Helsinki during beginning of July 99. About the
sound of the songs, well I think it will be a suprise for everyone ! At the
beginng of the sessions we thought that we should make the album sounding much
different than "lumo". The guys in the band have thought that we
could use more old sounding keyboards, like rhodes electric piano, Hammond B3
sounds and old analog synths that I have, well I was very suprised about that,
cause with A.D.G. I never used those ones.
We also
didn't record guitars with the typical Marshall sound: I took with me a very
interesting machine, a true tube 4 channel mixer/amplifier (made by Phillips)
from 50's I bought from a second hand job in the beginning of 90's.
So, we
decided to use Marshall's EQ and then connect from Marshall's line Output
straight to that old tube box and then to the normal 4x12 Marshall's box. In
that way we got a very powerful, tight and massive guitar sound ! I also took
collection of my old effect pedals, like phaser, fuzz, tremolo, two autowhas,
vocoders.
We made
Ari's rythm guitar sounding very "retro" (like bands in 60's and
70's) with those connetions and pedals. Cause guitar sounds are so powerfull, I
didn't record much synths in power parts, in easier parts I used just those old
sounding sound making that album sounding very retro, sometimes very jazzy (!),
sometimes very trip hop, but what the best very melancholic !?
Jukka