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Floex: Zorya – Scandinavian-style Classy Electronica from the Czech Republic

Posted by Lauri Jarvilehto on

I find the Czech one-man-band Floex, also known as Tomáš Dvorák, some of the most interesting music out there right now. While my favorite out of all of Dvorak’s productions is the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack for the excellent game Machinarium, his latest release, Zorya does not trail far behind.

Dvorak has an amazing scale of expression, ranging from very contemporary electornica gimmickry to traditional jazz to film music mainstays. The closest comparisons that come to mind are, for some weird reason, all Scandinavian: the Danish Trentemøller, the early releases of the Norwegian Röyksopp, and the Finnish (yes, Finnish) Roberto Rodriguez. Throw these three into blender in a perfect mix, and you would probably get something quite close to Floex. There are also flavors that remind me of more eccentric electronica such as Boards of Canada and Mouse on Mars. And, of course, the Mark Bell era of Björk.

All together, the Czech musical genius Dvorák has managed to create another haunting and beautiful masterpiece that will certainly last several listening-throughs. If you are into classy intelligent electronica, be sure to check it out here.

Music Only Comes Alive When Shared

Posted by Lauri Jarvilehto on

Writing music just for oneself feels like an empty business. I do not quite clearly understand why, though.

I spent some ten years of my life working as a professional musician. I released several hundred tracks on albums, on television, in commercials and multimedia, to audiences ranging from a few hundred to several millions. For the last seven or so years, I have, however, focused most of my time on research. While I now write music as something like a well-developed hobby, why do I still bother to release it to the general audience?

I have wondered at this urge to share music for pretty much my entire adult life. When I was younger, I would drag all friends and family to listen to every new tune I wrote. In my professional career, I got the satisfaction from releasing music. And now, I have this blog. But why?

Despite the ideal of artistic independence, I believe when people write music, they don’t do it just for the kick they get out of it – even if that is, for most of us, the beginning of getting into music. It is, indeed, a very rare breed of musician that would never play her music to anybody else. Even those few who refuse to play their tracks usually turn out to be meek because they are scared of the chance of bad criticism. Can there really even exist a musician who would not want their music to be heard (and loved) by somebody else?

I wonder whether music is actually a form of communication, where the listener is just as important as the maker. Or whether music is a kind of a relationship between a listener and a maker that does not even come to existence before sharing. No, but really: I still do not have the faintest idea. Maybe you do?

It’s almost as if it’s easier to figure out how neurons communicate with one another, or how the unconscious mind works than to understand why music won’t let itself remain unheard. But whatever the reason, and whether or not I will ever discover it, I am pretty sure of one thing.

Music only comes alive when shared.

New Inspirations: Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Posted by Lauri Jarvilehto on

Now if this is not an event in the world of graphic novels, I don’t know what is. Brian K. Vaughan of Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina fame has teamed up with Fiona Staples of Mystery Society. The two have produced something that is pretty close to a perfect beginning for a graphic novel: Saga.

Saga is a science fiction adventure set in a future intergalactic world. It has been compared both to the classic Star Wars movies and Game of Thrones. And with good reason. Only two issues down, the series has already been able to capture moments not unlike the banter of Han Solo in A New Hope, the awe of the first sight of the AT-AT walkers on Hoth, the intrigue of the Lannisters and even the idiosyncrasies of the Targaryens. When we see the gleaming eyes of the Horrors of Cleave for the first time, what springs to mind immediately are the Rat Creatures from Bone. And the android prince with a TV set for a head? Pure gold, that propels the mind to classics like Leiji Matsumoto’s Galaxy Express.

Set against a Shakespearean love story of a star-crossed couple on the run, the story is imaginative to a degree I have never seen, and yet in something of the same way the original Star Wars was: with some scrutiny, you can start to see the influences that have driven Vaughan and Staples. But as with all great art, wearing your influences on your sleeve is not a detriment, but rather only adds to the pleasure. Talent borrows, genius steals.

All together, the first two issues of Saga have opened up a world that is so vibrant, so imaginative and so alive that I am not quite sure I have ever encountered something like this before. If you are in the least interested in science fiction, comics, or good stories in general, be sure to check it out. If you go digital, you can get the first issue straight away from Comixology.

Right now, the only downside I can think of for this series is that the next issues surely have a great deal to live up to. But if Vaughan and Staples can keep up with this pace, not unlike Vaughan has already proven he can with the epic storylines of Y and Ex Machina, this is setting out to be the new standard against which the future works of science fiction in comics will be judged.

Valhalla Shimmer

Posted by Lauri Jarvilehto on

These days, I am terribly un-technoogy-oriented. I used to be a real tech geek back in the day, checking in at GearSlutz several times a day, dropping in at the music store twice a week. But at some point I realized it’s not the gear that makes the music – it’s the human being.

Anyway, lots of tech or not lots of tech, its usually not the tech that makes the difference. Except when it does. I try to make do with a handful of plugins I know really well, and having narrowed down the set, there are a few ones I would not really feel comfortable working without. One of them is this outstanding reverb plugin called Valhalla Shimmer.

I used to have a selection of top notch reverb units from Lexicon, TC Electronic and the likes, but nothing has ever come close to Valhalla Shimmer. It’s nowhere near in fidelity to its more successful siblings, but for what music I write, it’s a perfect fit. No, you can’t tweak a great snare room out of it. But boy what can this little piece of genius do to a piano lead or a synth pad.

There are a lot of synths and sample sets out there that promise a spacey timey-wimey ethereal sound – synths and sets that have been programmed by some of the best sound designers out there. But I think none of these capture the straight simplicity and elegance of Valhalla Shimmer: you can run pretty much any hand-picked synth line through its frequency modulated reverbs and they come to life unlike really anything much out there.

It’s also not terribly expensive. So if you like your music ethereal, be sure to give it a go.

The Anatomy of an Album

Posted by Lauri Jarvilehto on

Any music is really a network of ideas. At the heart of Launchland is the deep influence of the music of Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis. Also, many songs have been directly influenced by film music and classical music.

“Row Row Row Your Boat” references a scene from (yes, I know the movie sucked but anyway) Star Trek V where Kirk and Bones are singing the song and Spock is wondering about the ritual. The song itself goes way back to stuff like Brian Eno’s Apollo and Jarre’s Waiting for Cousteau. It’s also a hat tip to Joel Goldsmith’s outstanding Stargate Universe score, which I loved to death. (It’s funny but I just realized that you can hear tones from that score on “Tau Ceti Center” too, which was directly influenced by Goldsmith’s dad Jerry.)

“Aldebaran” began with playing with a Top Gun-ish sound on the Yamaha SY99, which led to this amalgam of the “Top Gun Anthem” by Harold Faltermeyer, “Main Sequence” from Albedo 0.39 by Vangelis and “Chariots of Fire” by the same.

“Quantum Thief” – a nod to my countryman Hannu Rajaniemi’s mind-blowing novel by the same name – steals or borrows (you name it) from the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony and from Clint Mansell’s Moon soundtrack. The flute melody is a nod to Ennio Morricone’s mindblowing and chilling soundtrack for The Secret of Sahara. (Which I last saw as a little kid and loved back then.)

“Stella Maris,” another name for the VIrgin Mary, is of course an obvious nod to Charles Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” which is in turn based on Bach’s “Prelude no. 1″ from the Well-tempered Clavier. Another Bach song is also a direct influence, namely the “Air on a G string” (which is actually an adaptation by August Wilhelmj, but anyway). The bassline turnover between verses was actually a carbon copy of the Air at first (going G, A, B, C, D, F, E, D), but then I changed it to a straight G major scale since… I don’t know. To make it slightly different after all. Why do you make these choices in music anyway?

To complete the circle, “Approaching Delta Pavonis” nicks a synth comp from Jarre’s “Magnetic Fields I” (an amazingly majestic song), one that the impOscar’s default preset just cries out to play with a little added portamento. (And yes, while tweaking is amazing, there is nothing wrong with playing with default presets when they fit. Ask Vangelis.)

I know a musician should not write analyses like this about their music. The music should speak for itself. But really: this is almost as much fun as writing the actual music. And anyway, there is so much left to discover in the songs even with this anatomical study that I think I haven’t spoiled all the fun.

To wrap up, Igor Stravinsky once said, talent borrows, genius steals. The rest of us, we just make music we love to listen to.

(And yes, my musician friends always told me I think too much. So there.)

Music from the Future of the Past: How a 15-Year-Old Melody Became the Key to Launchland

Posted by Lauri Jarvilehto on

The main melody for the track “Tau Ceti Center” is something I wrote around fifteen years ago. For some reason I could never quite grasp how to get this theme sorted out, though. I think I have tried in one form or another to make a publishable song from this theme from at least the late 1990′s. I guess I had already given up on it, when all of a sudden early last year, it just clicked.

Playing with an impOscar, I stumbled upon the dual arpeggiator lines that carry the song along, with the theme played on a Mellotron woodwind. The secondary theme came soon after, and with that the orchestration also clicked into place. The rhythm track, though, was harder. Bear McCreary’s soundtracks for Battlestar Galactica and Caprica have been a huge influence for me in the past few years. Drawing from that inspiration, the first version of the song had a very ethnically influenced rhythm track (something like “The Wild”, but wilder). The song was too hectic, though.

I remember listening to a concert by Jerry Goldsmith (of Star Trek fame) in Oulu in mid-90’s. I had paid attention to how Goldsmith often used a drum kit with the orchestra only to play out a straight beat comp. I tried out this basic rhythm, and things clicked into place: at this point, the rest of the music practically wrote itself.

After 15 years and I don’t know how many versions, it certainly felt weird to have this song sorted out. It still does.

Launchland: Music for the Science Fiction Imagination

Posted by Lauri Jarvilehto on

This album is about books. Books and movies, really, but mostly about books. Books are a world I live in, and out of all the worlds of books, the world of science fiction has stood paragon for me ever since I was twelve years old or so.

I must confess: I have not written the songs to the books they refer to. Rather, I have sought in the endless worlds hidden in my bookshelf for those moods and emotions that best fit the music in my mind. So it’s not like these songs were created as soundtracks for these books. But rather, they have come to be out of the same endless depths of imagination as the books and stories they are named after.

One song reminds me of the oceanic vistas in Léo’s amazing graphic novel, and is dubbed after it: Aldebaran. Another one was written when I was starting to read Hannu Rajaniemi’s outstanding Quantum Thief. It always propels my mind to the plaza in Mars where time beggars try desperately to extend their lives for one more moment of ordinary life. (Insofar as life on a futuristic transhumanist Mars can be called ordinary to begin with.)

Perhaps most significantly for this particular album, two of the songs are linked intricately to two novels by Alastair Reynolds. House of Suns may simply be the best science fiction novel I have ever read. Its outrageous scale and courage left me dumbstruck turning page after page, and the story still has not left me, some two years after reading it. The bizarre galaxy-spanning love story of Campion and Purslane is in many ways completely unique – quite a feat for a fictitious book in the 21st century. The second song, the album finale “Approaching Delta Pavonis,” links to a progression of events in Reynolds’ debut, Revelation Space. When the lighthugger Nostalgia for Infinity approaches the star Delta Pavonis, things are only beginning to happen. And a beginning, I believe, is as good a place to end as any.

At the end of the day, this music is about imagination. The worlds where my mind has wandered have left their mark, and that mark is stamped on these songs. I hope that these songs go some way to propel you too to new worlds beyond anyone else’s imagination – your own private worlds, with a shared genesis in these stories.

I hope this album gives you the odd chance to launch at the stars – and land at worlds never before seen by anybody else.

You can buy the album at iTunes or Amazon. You can also download it free of charge here.