Studio Diary part 7!!!

OK, here it is. It's the Stocholm Special!!!:)
Sorry for the delay. Delay is our middle name.

Again, this is very dumb material. Sorry it for that as well. It just seems that the camera starts rolling when we are at our weirdest, and that doesn't quite do justice for the hard work that actually got down as well :)


About the album: Can't wait for you to hear it. We are sitting on dynamite. You have no idea....

Done.

Everything is on tape. Everything. We are back home. What happened exactly?
Video stuff tomorrow.

Last Day in the Studio

Good morning from rainy Stockholm. This is the final day of the recordings for our forthcoming third album. The mixing is done later on somewhere else by someone else, but this is the last day that any sound is going on tape. If there wouldn’t be four smelly guys sleeping in this apartment, and the ventilation would work, I’m pretty sure we’d notice that there’s some magic in the air.
We still got some guitars to play, a few synth-lines, maybe some more piano, ummm some vocals to scream…..then we have to record the refrigerator in our apartment and the traffic lights down the street. As Jussi would put it, there’s another Swamp of Possibilities to cross.
Sooo…We have a long day/night ahead of us. I better wake the rest of the team up and start working.
With Citromix by our side, we cease the day with bravery and joy, we clench our fists with the dawn, wrestle with the Gods of Rock’n Roll, and when the dust finally settles, we are REALITY!!! We will be VICTORIOUS!!!
And then we drink some coffee.



Oh yeah, we PROMISE a video or two in the next few days, it’s just so busy right now that there‘s no time for editing. The footage is going to be very uninformative and maybe the dumbest yet, though. :)

Stockholm Skakar!!!

We are in Stocholm, finishing up the album. Singing, playing guitar and synths and making weird noises. We are knee-deep in this now, but we'll try to put up a full status report and the next video diary soon!

Peas!!!!

Re-runs

We're back home. Where did the time go?
We are going to continue working in January in Stockholm. We'll get more videos then.
Here's the parts 1-6 as a holiday re-run. :)

Naphopping

Need to relax? Tired of the daily grind?
Here's an alternative for drowning your sorrow into alcohol and bad nightlife: Naphopping!

Step 1. Get yourself really tired. (sing, play, pump iron, worry etc.)
Step 2. Find a weird place to sleep in. Something you're not used to. Choose a place that you propably won't recognize when you suddenly wake up. (a hotel room, you're friend's apartment, the attic, or total darkness)
Step 3. When you're hyper tired, set your alarm clock to wake you up in 1 hour, and set the snooze mode to 10 minute stretches.
Step 4. Fall asleep (yeah right)
Step 5. Alarm clock rings. When you wake up, hit the snooze button and quickly think of something you want to dream of (Jennifer Connelly, flying, humidors, Tegan & Sara, crossbows, a riff, custom guitars, world peace, raspberries...)
Step 6. If it's working as it should, you'll start dreaming of the thing you thought of during the sudden moment of clarity. Of course the logic of dreams adds the weird elements into your chosen topic, but if you concentrate really well, you could fly around with Jennifer Connelly, fighting together for world peace. She's super good with the crossbow and you can select the tastiest cigars out of your portable humidor-backpack while she takes out the bad guys.
Step 7. Wake up suddenly to the alarm again. Hit snooze. Think of something you'd like to add to the previous nap-flash, or if it was perfect, just try to continue from where you left off. If it works, you'll still rule the skies with jennifer, but this time with Daft Punk playing in the backround.
Step 8. Continue hopping from a dream to another as long as you wish. Don't stop if it gets weird, that's the best bit.

When you wake up, you'll feel surreal and weird, but hopefully also relaxed and cheery. When you get the feel of it, you can also adapt naphopping into your morning sleep. Just set your alarm ringing 50 min. in advance, so you'll have 5 flash-naps to hop into before you have to wake up for real.

Some otherworldly music could get you in the mood, just before the first collapse.

Soundtrack suggestions:
PJ Harvey: White Chalk
Burial: Untrue
The Field: From Here We Go Sublime
Deerhunter: Cryptograms
Anything from The Knife or M83

Video Diary part 6

Back on the muthafuckin' street!

Video Diary part 5

What day is it? Thursday?
Yeeeaaa. It took some time to get this done, or actually it took time to find the time to do it. We've been super busy laying down the guitars, bass and vocals in. As usual the timetable seems frightening, and things start getting a bit crazy. We got four days to go, and there's so much stuff to be done. We have three different working stations around the studio, one for guitars, one for bass and one for the vocals. Allthough it's hard to get a perspective on the songs you are working so intensively on, but everything sounds very very good. We're healthy, fit, and smelly. We pump iron every morning. We are Rambo.

-D.E.

P.S. If our producer is called Pelle and engineer is Herman, what does that lead to?

Video Diary part 4

Here's the Video Diary part 4 for you. It's a bit shorter than the previous, but we try to keep the material even somehow informative.
Everything is moving smoothly. We finished all the basic drums&bass couple of days ago, Mikko did an amazing job banging the hell out his Yamahas, and Lasse's bass takes seem to be very solid.

Jussi has started to do overdubs on the guitars and tonight we're going to start on the vocals as well. Expect footage of that in the next video diaries. The album whole is starting to shape up. We still have 18 tracks to choose from, though. It's going to be a horrible task to start cutting more songs out. Think of having 18 children and having to choose which ones you are not going to give food to. Album title is another big question, we have some pretty strong contenders...

Apart from two trips to the Spar in the nearest village, we've been fairly isolated inside the studio. It's very comfortable in here and the outside world is starting to feel very distant. And there's really nowhere to go since we're surrounded by fields of corn as long as the eyes can see. At night it get's so dark that when you walk 20 meters from the studio area, you can't see even the lenght of your arm. If the electricity would go out, we'd shit our pants so fast. There's no streetlights in nothingness.

Friends, have a good day/night. Talk to you soon.

-Disco Ensemble

Video Diary Part 3

Sorry it took a while with this one. We'll post Video Diary Part 4 and a full status raport tomorrow or even later today. Promise? Promise.

The Melter

Who the hell is Michael Lee Roth? Yeeep, last night went on way too late :) And that of course made us sleep too late. And that propably makes us work too late tonight. But if we work really late it gets closer to working really early, so that's OK then.

Here's a melting man for you. He used to be a lumberjack. He's often seen in the countryside, nervously hovering above the fields with his axe. He's definitively not evil, but you can understand that his condition makes him very desperate and potentially very dangerous.

Ramblings of madmen! 4:14 a.m.

It's 4:14 in the morning. Sunday has turned in to a monday. Though when in the studio, you don't really follow the weekdays. In here every day feels like a saturday. We are not really in the mood to following the news or taking care of anything ordinary. We've solidly nailed four songs today. It's a track record. Everything sounds ridiculously good. We gave our selves the permit to loosen up a bit after the hammering, and we found out that Pelle turned out to be a Michael Lee Roth enthusiasist after a few glasses of wine. Then we listened to XTC and Dead Kennedys and gave ourselves the pleasure of even more wine! We really need to go to sleep right now.

Oh yeah, David Lee Roth is an nowadays an ambulance driver and Mikko is the re-incarnation of Keith Moon.

Video Diary Part 2

Good evening/morning. Here's the video diary part 2. Hope you get something out of it. Pro editing again...
We've had Saturday Night Fever in here. We just finished for today, we've been bashing down the groundwork pretty fluently. Mikko has been playing like a warlock.
Feeling like throwing up, let's go to sleep.

Soundchecking

We started playing songs trough last night, Pelle (producer) and Johan (engineer) have tweaked all the sounds meticulously, and it's starting to sound excellent. Jussi is on the journey to find "The Guitar Sound", and today we should be able to start hammering stuff on tape for real.
We are filming random stuff all the time, expect the Video Diary Part 2 in the next few days. It's still hard to say how much we can concentrate on documentation when the real bashing begins, but we'll do our best.
Danish yoghurt is delicious!

Video Diary Part 1

Good Morning, and welcome to our Studio Diary!

HERE'S THE VIDEO DIARY PART 1:


So, here we are, somewhere in Denmark, at PUK-studios, recording our third full-lenght album. During the next three weeks we are going to fill this blog as often as we can with video diaries, pictures, ramblings and what ever random stuff we come up with. We are kind of new to this blogging thing, so please be patient...
And as we have learned from the previous studio sessions, things can get a bit weird when you're stranded in the middle of nowhere, so the material is bound to get stupid.
Needless to say, we are pumped up, super confident and very very excited to start working on the material.
And we hope you all can get something out of this blog.

Foreign readers note: we'll try to speak as much english as we can in the next videos, the subtitles are not really happening...