THIS BIOGRAPHY IS VERY OUTDATED
and the grammar oh god the grammar

10 November 2010

Chapter 9.1

Chapter 8.2 - Index - Chapter 9.2

Ninth chapter:
Censorstorm
(2008)

On January 14th they started recording the EP, which would be called Tulimyrsky (Firestorm). This time they didn't go to Kemi, but chose to stay in Helsinki and record in Jive Studios, property of Jukka Varmo, who is also their live sound engineer. Now I could start to write about the recording process,

Jukka Varmo
but Marko and Henri do it better than me. Not being a studio diary, they kept telling stuff in the forum. Marko, please?

"It was only the title track that we had to hurry on the writing before entering studio. It was written ready a couple of days before the studio was supposed to start. We didn't even got time to rehearse it together so everybody had to learn their parts on their own (at home, work, bus, even in car haha!).

"It took 2 days to play the drums for every song so it's pretty much the same as on the earlier sessions. This time we've been extremely fast setting up the sounds because we work at our live engineer's studio and he knows what we need. Also every other instruments were played during the first week leaving 5 or 6 days for Ville to do his vocals without hurry and without being afraid of losing his voice."

Henri: "I just wanted to point out that EVEN we finished the composing of the title track only a couple of days before entering the studios, it does not mean that it's done hasty or something like that. As usual, the final tweaking took a LOT of time,

Tomi Koivusaari (Amorphis)
and I had e.g. three different versions how to end the song of which I had to choose from, etc. etc. We're all extremely satisfied with the material."

The recording was finished in the end of February. They had three guest musicians: Tomi Koivusaari (of Amorphis) sang some lead lines, Oppu Laine (of Mannhai) contributed to the choirs and Olav Eira, guitarist of the folk band Áigi and of Norse origin, helped Ville to correctly pronounce Norwegian "because we didn't want them to sound like Manowar do (for Oh-dinn's sake!)" and also read some fragments of the Edda in Icelandic / old Norse for the end of "Hvergelmir". As usual, they had Janne in choirs, and for the first time they hired an actor to put his voice in the narrations, which are also a novelty in Moonsorrow. The actor is called Turkka Mastomäki and is very famous in Finland, apparently, but not outside. It was also revealed that the new song would last for half an hour, and the other four would be two re-recorded songs from the demos: "Taistelu pohjolasta" and "Hvergelmir"; and

Turkka Mastomäki
the other two would be covers: "Back to North" by Merciless and "For whom the bell tolls" by Metallica, being the latter a recording they had done back in 2005, when they recorded Raah Raah Blääh; the arrangement and a demo recording had been done as early as 2003. Truth to say, it sounds much more like Moonsorrow than like Metallica. Curious fact: it's sung by Henri. And two questions they would be asked in all interviews are the ones Ville's answering here: "The Metallica cover was recorded in 2005, and in that moment we had no idea about the EP. When we started to plan this EP we knew this cover was still available and we could incorporate it. Concerning "Back to North", we used to play it live back in 2000/2001. [...] Covering Bathory in Moonsorrow style would be something very boring. It would sound too much like imitation of the original, and there is no point in doing an imitation. We chose Metallica and Merciless because we had our own, distinctly Moonsorrow-sounding vision of those two songs in mind."

For whom the bell tolls


Chapter 8.2 - Index - Chapter 9.2

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