The Death of a Dogma

These are the chronicles of Sestina's most recent adventures into the fearsome world of home recording, from the Fall of 2011 to the Spring of 2012. 

Join us as we bullheadedly try to realize the illusion of high budget studio magic in bathroom & duct-tape acoustics of lo-fi tracking!

Sestina recordings 2011-2012, Part I: The Death of a Dogma

Apologies for the above mouthful of a title. It is a reference to my high & mighty, hot-headed rantings about certain preferred recording practices from a while back.

You see, this time when recording we pretty much decided to take the easiest way and track everything individually. On a click track. Using triggered drums. (ugh)

This method is pretty much diametrically opposed to the aforementioned recording dogmas of the past. Live sound my ass, this time it would be post-processing all the way. Zeroes and ones and computer synthetics. Bring in the robots, bring in the plugins - damn the human element!

* * *

A visual representation of our recording philosophy.

Of course, there are good reasons for this kind of jackassery, none of which are artistic. Rather they are well presented in the age-old mantra "beggars can't be choosers".

Zero budget recordings. This state of affairs dictated our approach when we holed up in our band rehearsal space in October, 2011: No big studio and fancy equipment to play around with - just a laptop, a few mics and a room with the acoustic properties of a high school gym locker room. No matter how majestic the sounds might be coming out of our speakers & skins, in this particular space they promptly transform into a fart in a can.

A veritable cave of inspiration for the budding sound engineer. The job which, as usual, fell on Jaakko to do, for the simple reason that he's the only one of us who can do it well. With power comes great responsibility!

* * *

Make no mistake, we'd still love to record everything live in a million dollar a day studio, in a acoustically contoured hall the size of an airplane hangar, while sipping piña coladas and lazily dissecting the merits the David Bowie's vocal miking on "Heroes". With David Bowie, chatting us live from the control room talkback. However, in this case, we just had to scale down our ambitions just a bit from that standard to get the message across.

In the end, that's what's important, right? Not the package, not the delivery, but what's inside.

Let's delve into that a bit closer next week. Ie. the actual songs.

Until then, here's something for inspiration and general awesomeness:

~Markus




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Sestina…lives!

Well hello there, dear friends.

I know this blog has been quiet for a spell. This doesn't mean the band's been asleep…far from it, actually. There's a pretty huge backlog of stuff I want to catch up on this blog, which means some of the upcoming updates will be a bit like taking a walk down the memory lane.

However, since we're right now actually in the process of putting out the stuff we've been working on for the last months, looking back is entirely appropriate.

So, you can expect:

• Blogs on our most recent studio adventures
• Some background on our two new songs, "The Wait" and "Catch a Fire"
• Live show blogs
• Working on new songs
• Ruminations on the future activities of Sestina

Of course, there's also some missing blogs from last year, like the complete song blogs on "Faster" and "Wake Up One Night". Don't worry, those are on the way as well.

The bottom line: No time like the present time for Sestina. Wonderful things on the way - join us for the ride!

~Markus

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Live inspiration:

M83 @ Coachella, 2012

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"Faster" - The song and how it came about

Most of the time, writing songs for me is just picking up a guitar and waiting for something to come out of the soundhole. However, sometimes songs come out of a desire to write a very specific kind of tune, or a song in a certain chosen genre. The push may come from instrumentation, rhythm, or just from the basic inspiration to melt faces live.


Even from this wider perspective, "Faster" was a freak of a song to write. It came about from a surprisingly persistent desire to convey a very specific mood through music; the feverish feel of driving in a car at high speeds on empty roads at night. Don't ask me why, this probably comes from my lifelong fascination with a bevy of 80's soft rock bands and early MTV music videos.

* * *

If this gets Chris Rea going, it's good enough for me too.

Anyway, at first I didn't have anything but this basic feel I was going for - no melodies, no rhythms, no nothing. Then came the basic bass pattern, quickly followed by a very Billy Idolish guitar bridge chorus. Like is typical for me with these kinds of things, the first reaction was laughter, next came embarrassment, and then the quiet resignation that this silly little riff was actually quite necessary. And awesome in its own way.


With these couple of parts floating about, I let the song brew in its own juices for a very long time. It was maybe five years altogether in the making, making "Faster" probably our second oldest new song after "Devil May Care". I was in no hurry to get it done; actually, I went back and forth with regarding the basic ideas and melodies ridiculous or worthwhile.

* * *

Fittingly, the chorus vocal melody came to me when I was driving, although admittedly during the daytime and at conservative speeds. I was coming back from visiting my grandmother at a hospital, which was the last time I ever saw her. The chorus chords, that had recently been going through various transformations in my head, took their final shape as I sat down in the car and came up with a bit of an unusual staccato vocal line. (Which later on would prove to be a bitch to write words to).


Again, much to the confusion of my beloved bandmates, the song was far from finished when I brought it to rehearsals. It had maybe two guitar parts, and the rest was just humming, rhythms and making a lot of unsettling gestures to try to let everyone know what I had in mind. Fortunately, they grasped the tune pretty fast and turned into something much better. Instead of keeping the pulse throughout the chorus, they made it driving and heavy at the same time, which suited the vocals perfectly.

* * *

In the end, I'm happy to say the song ended up being very close to the mood and feel I initially was going for, even though the incubation period laster forever. 


Never resist ideas, my friends. Especially the persistent ones.


~Markus


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Token background music. Yet again:

Radiohead - King of Limbs

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Waste No Words - The Words

Most Sestina songs are love stories. Now why do I feel slightly ashamed to admit that?


Let's face it, choosing to write a love song is not exaclty the most original route to take. You can write about just about anything else and feel more pioneering about it.


On the other hand, no two love stories are the same, so writing about them never really gets old. Just ask Paul McCartney.

* * *

The lyrics in Waste No Words came out of a working title and a simple idea for a  story I had. The two had no real common thematic ground to begin with, but I decided to put them together anyway. Quite like in a good, old-fashioned marriage arrangement. Sometimes it's refreshing to just toy around with ideas and see what comes out.


Not the easiest write, though. This was one of my earlier "new" Sestina lyrics, and at this point I was still trying to figure out how to convey a story in the little space of a song. Come to think of it, I still am.


Anyway, telling a love story is an especially tricky thing to pull off with a handful of lines. There has to be some point of focus, or you'll probably find yourself grasping at straws trying to cram it all in there. Sounds reasonable, right?


So in the spirit of disregarding my own rules (I've been doing a lot of that lately) I ended up trying to cover the whole thing anyway; or, at least, the space of one year. I didn't start out that way, but a lot of things kept changing while going through many drafts - the ages of the characters, the story arc etc. - so eventually I just let the story freely go where it wanted.


I think it turned out pretty good in the end.

* * *

The last lines I wrote were the last lines of the song. That was actually the moment I really understood the story I was telling. When I began rehearsing the song by myself, it was only after a few days I could finish that part without choking up.


Hopeless love stories from a hopeless sap to hopeless romantics...


~Markus


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Waste No words

turning around
spots him in a crowd

a face so young bears no lines at all

hers a roadmap of the lost and the alone

such a pretty thing

he takes her by the hand

like a lover like a son

she breathes him in
and he breathes her out

one more sigh
then he helps her down

still holds on
she stays wrapped around

for the longest time
she fears

she's falling hard

saying

"waste no words

you're all alone

save the truth

for somebody who wouldn't know"

she fills her heart

asleep in his arms

and dreams about the final train out of this town

spring moves on
this has got to stop

tells herself that one month is enough

takes one year before deciding that she's done

they say love is never found in cheap motels

but the boy is waiting
and she says

"waste no words

he's all alone

save the truth

for somebody who wouldn't know"

she fills her heart

asleep in his arms

and dreams about the final train out of this town

she knows herself

knows what time can do

still tells him

"this I swear is true"

"I might be old
I might be a fool

but I'll stay here

and I belong to you"

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Chosen films for a counter-intuitive writing environment:

Mario van Peebles - Baadasssss!

Christopher Smith - Severance

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Faster = Later

The irony...oh, the unbearable irony...


Seems that our next song, the appropriately titled "Faster", is still some time away from reaching your ears, our dear listeners.


The reason for the holdup is simple: Much of what we recorded live is rubbish. Out of tune, out of beat, sounds bad, feels worse. Just plain crap.


The song is amazing, though.




Thankfully, Pekka did best of us three slobs, so we're keeping his pretty excellent drum tracks and building the song from there, top to bottom all over again. It's going to take a couple of weeks before we're there, though.


Since my recent rant extolling the virtues of live recording, I should probably be movie-quoting Jack Nicholson: "Well, don't I feel like the f*****g a*****e".




Bear with us, dear friends. We promise to make it worth your wait.


~Markus

Music to lessen/increase the guilt:

Jesu (pretty much anything they've ever recorded)

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Waste No Words - The song and how it came about

Writing music is fun? It's a total pain in the ass. Excruciating, continuous, torturous toil of putting in sweat, blood and tears for something that gives little or no rewards, until you just wish you were collecting stamps instead.

Ok, kidding. But no matter how many songs or riffs or ideas you come up with, every once in awhile you feel completely dried out. Run out of ideas. Like you're never going to write a decent song again.

It's actually quite amusing how easy it is to believe each time this happens, even though the ideas always eventually come.

* * *

After one of these long, dry spells, Waste No Words was a proverbial cork off the floodgate. I had a daily date with my guitar for weeks on end, but nothing seemed to come out of it; I discarded bad ideas as fast as I was coming up with them.

Then, one afternoon, the chorus riff just came out by itself, and I wrote the verse right after it. In less than an hour, I had the basic song structure down along with the vocal melodies. I liked it, so I brought it to the band right away.

At this point, we'd wrtitten enough together as a band to get to the meat of the song right away. It was one of our the fastest writes yet - practically all the first-time arrangements stuck.

* * *

This needs to be in color.
The awesomeness of Bolton cannot be contained in BW

One thing I really wanted to avoid was making this song into a Def Leppard ballad. The verse vocal lines are sappy enough to pour some serious sugar on an unsuspecting listener, and on top of that, I always saw this as a love song. Waste No Words had all the makings of a '80's hair band disaster.

Fortunately, one thing that always comes to rescue at times like these is our tuning policy - once the chorus kicks in, along with Jaakko's bass sounding like the Goat of Mendes farting blood on a bible camp, any traces of sap are effectively removed.

Maybe in the future, we should embrace this effeminate side of ours. Go full ballad. Become the Michael Boltons of shoegazing metal. "Can I Touch You There"?

Why the hell not, Michael. Grope away.

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Music for the unsuspecting masses:

PJ  Harvey - Let England Shake

Devin Townsend . Deadhead, Addicted (LP)

Michael Bolton - Can I Touch You There

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Ocean Sky - The words

Writing words for Sestina is all about stories.

Somewhere along the way, I got tired of writing the garden-variety semi- or fully autobiographical confessionals for song lyrics. That seems to be what everyone is expecting from singers: Singing is such a personal, naked act that people tend to automatically assume that you're singing about yourself and your own real-life experiences. I think most singer-songwriters more or less have to deal with peoples expectations of them being the protagonist in their songs, and for many, this is a comfortable, natural route to take in writing.

* * *

The ghost of crooners past 

Ocean Sky was one of the first songs where I made the conscious choice of just writing a story about something other than myself, just anything that suited the music best. This was a liberating experience - for the first time, I didn't have to exaggerate the modest dramas of my own, rather placid life, but I had the freedom to create a story I felt strongly about, one that I really wanted to tell.

My initial concern was that I wouldn't be able to react emotionally as strongly to this new "fiction" as when singing about personal matters. Interestingly, it proved to be the opposite; I was quite surprised how hard the song hit me when I finished the words. It's a very simple story, but there's something going on beneath the surface that, in some ways, is just as much a piece of myself as a memory or an experience.

* * *

The lyrics for Ocean Sky were written piece by piece. The story is based on a short poem I wrote years ago on a Summer day while sitting in a train, waiting for departure. A long time afterwards, when the music for the song was completed, I happened to be going through my sketchbook and rediscovered the poem. It felt right for what we were working on, so I took the title and a few lines, and it ballooned into a story.

So nowadays, practically all the words for Sestina songs are stories. I'm having a lot of fun painting with these new colors, letting the song reveal what it wants to tell. Kind of like having beats and notes giving birth to places and dreams.

As far as past-times go, I think I'm pretty happy with this one.

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Ocean Sky

under the ocean sky

you drown in sighs

you remember

sometimes

under the ocean sky

steps that cross the shoreline

are taken by the tide

and by dawn

you'll be gone

and close the door

head on out

and sink the oars

drift on with the flow

with the autumn tide

you leave your home

come morning light

you leave the shore

follow until you're lost

under the ocean sky

you miss but can't recall

her eyes and how she smiled

when she thought that no-one saw

and how she used to lay

awake before the dawn

in a bedroom full of flowers

with a window out to sea

you gave out for the waves

that dress she never wore

quit hoping many times

until one day you saw

with shards of wood and quills

it washed back on the shore

white as it ever was

her hair caught in its straps

take me down

take me below

show me where

the rivers are born

take me down

take me below

show me where

the buried go

* * *

Music to trigger inferiority complexes to:

Radiohead - The King of Limbs

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