Ballet

What's going on?

2009-11-20T02:07:00.000-08:00

Woa.

We've been relatively quiet these last few weeks, but boy have we got some big ideas bubbling in our minds.!

Emil and Eugene are busy working with the upcoming album (currently recording guitars and arranging horns and strings. Nice.) and the rest of us are busy promoting the new single - St. Petersburg. (If you haven't heard it yet, take a peek at the links at the end of this entry..)

And as if that isn't more than enough work alongside our studies and jobs, we're also planning on launching a line of Ballet -related merchandise! Yay!! Buttons, bags.. ..you name it. So please be patient as we doodle around to find the perfect graphics for the band. It might take some time 'cause though we might sound great, it's important for us to look great too.

But wait! There's even more! For those of you who crave the old EPs (Parade, Parade & There Was A City Buried Here), we've got good news for you. The plan is to get both albums downloadable online AND (get ready..) probably for FREE! Yep, we've lost it. Both albums for free. No, we don't take creditcards nor cash, we're just giving them away. Aren't we sweet?

Peace.

-Ville

For all you hill people who still haven't heard our new single, here's the links:

Spotify

iTunes Store

MySpace

and be sure to join our Facebook group for updates on gigs, the upcoming album, our new merchandise and wotnot.

New Single

2009-11-05T16:48:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since we released our last Ep. Now it's time for some new shit.
We released a single called "St. Petersburg", you can go and listen it on myspace, spotify or if you want to buy it, click yourself into the amazing iTunes-store. The song is some foretaste of the new material we've been recording.
We printed only an exclusive 100 copies of it. Mostly were gonna hype them out to the "industry-figures", but, we have some spare copies we're selling on gigs. And who knows, if those babies start seriously selling themselves we'll print some more.
The album is cooking steady in our huge studio-oven. We have big ideas, and on the other hand, a lot to do and figure out. But we decited we're going to release it next spring one way or another. So just wait for it... We shall drop some more goodies on the way.

Peace & Love

-Emil

Spinning september

2009-09-09T12:26:00.000-07:00

We are about to shoot our first music video and it's gonna happen this weekend. Man, it's a lot of work. Yesterday I dressed two of my friends in rococo stylish clothing which they're gonna appear with in the film. I wish people still dressed like that. Using an hour to dress up each morning. The making of the video is like a giant puzzle. All the pieces are scattered around Helsinki and we and a group of super-nice people are on a mission to find each one and put them together. There's all the actors, the costumes, the camera of course and all the other gear, food, a car!, and a lot else. It's a nice job though.
And there are a few cool shows to throw out this month as well. And above all: the recordings. Currently we are rolling in with the guitar tracks. We are luring some new songs in the set. So, if you're near by please come lend us your ear. We're gonna fill it up with something hot! muhahaha!
Remember to sleep and eat well.

yours,
Yo Hannes

Here's a cool video a friend of mine did with his home made camera lens-system. I like trains:

Solo pilots make better tricks as a team

2009-08-18T05:04:00.000-07:00

We've spent the whole day hunched over our laptops at Emppu's appartment, sending e-mails and making phone calls to various sources. Booking shows isn't actually that difficult, it seems. All you need is some coffee, jelly-sandwiches and someone else's internet. Talk is cheap, and we have lots of it.

We'll post a full list of shows at myspace in a few days.
Tuomas/Ballet

Update on upcoming dates

2009-08-07T01:53:00.001-07:00

July was pretty quiet for us. Jomppe traveled the world and came back yesterday with tanned arms and some more hair under his nose. Been really really trying to work on songs, but somehow we always end up doing something else. The weather is just too nice and we're just too thirsty I guess.
Maybe playing something live today. Don't know when or how, or with what intsruments since there's a zero tolerance of electricity in the place to be. But we have percussions and acoustic guitars, and maybe a twangy battery-operated amp for bass.
Confirmed some dates for the upcoming months. Only in Helsinki sadly, but it's always fun to play live, no matter where we are. As long as there's some microphones and monitors. So if you want to see us play to you or with you, give as a holler.
So there, see ya.
Tuomas/Ballet

The last day, and the songs we discovered

2009-06-21T16:57:00.000-07:00

What an amazing day we've had. We managed to record 3 more songs, of which two are something we've never done before.

The song recorded during the daytime is full of organs, and is probably the most emotionally charged song we've ever done. Try to think of a situation where you feel guilty for enjoying a funeral, and you're off to a good start.

Around midnight we turned a somewhat new song totally upside down, dropped the tempo around 80 BMPs, and ended up with 5 minutes of Space Echo bass, lazer-gun guitars and Mexican Zombie Orchestra-esque drums. It's nothing like we've ever done, and we're psyched.

Almost done. Only one more song to go tomorrow (and taking advantage of all the vintage keyboards and organs around the studio), then we'll pack up and head towards a place called home. People who have seen us live more then once might guess the last song.

Everything feels so good right now. We've worked hard, and it's starting to pay off. Now we just wait for August to start recording in Helsinki, and start piling up on guitars, keyboards, effect pedals, percussions, wind instruments, and everything else you can think of that can generate sounds to fit our world.

We'll post a sample of something we did a few days ago, we all think it captures the mood we've been in quite well.

Last night, and everyone's tired out of their minds. We celebrate with chips and chocolate, while listening to Nickelback and Metallica.

What an awesome week, don't think we've felt this good for a long long time. If ever.
Stay tuned, we'll keep on writing and posting.

Tuomas/Ballet

Day 3-5

2009-06-20T18:42:00.000-07:00

Pretty hectic and non-hectic past few days. Recording and composing. Managed to work out a brand new song yesterday (work title "Mel Gibson"!), which everyone loves to death. Influences ranged from Anna Eriksson to ...Trail Of Dead, with a piece of U2 and Haddaway hidden somewhere. It's amazing, it's us.

Not only work, last night was a lot of fun. Danced on the roof of a van and drank/spilled all the alcohol in the world. We revived ourselves today with pizza and footbag.

We're right on schedule, and the long process of recording Ballet's debut album has had the best possible start. Couple of days left, 10 drum- and basstracks recorded, few more ideas to try out. Tomorrow we'll try out another brand new song (with a raunchy work title). What a great week. We're right where we want to be.

We're running out of food, so if anyone has a lot of spare time (and stuff to eat), please come and visit. We'll wash the dishes.

Pöytälätkä rocks our socks off, if we'd have any.

Tuomas/Ballet

Day 2

2009-06-17T14:08:00.001-07:00

Time rolls fast.
Seems like I just woke up. Although I slept the longest the day has still been quite a sprint. We did keep up with the hazy schedule we planned and recorded basses and drums for three more songs. I still had time to edit more videos, which I have found very much fun. We have everything we need here: food, beer, instruments of all sorts, computers, xbox, a hdv-camera ect... I'm enjoying the thought of being in a wonderland. This true is our first album and all of this is quite new and exciting. Already I have met some personal challenges with this session and again come up with the same result: just have fun, it's all you need. Ush, this is the end of this caramel-talk. All the others are somewhere out there doing something I want to be a part of. I wish for one more footbag-competition.

Hulabaloo!
J from Ballet

Short Cut of our first day here

2009-06-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

Hey,

Check this out.
We used a demo track of our new song 'Superman And His Superwife' with this one. You'll hear it also on our upcoming album.

Enjoy. This is what we do here.

Johannes

Lot's of drums

2009-06-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

We spent most of the day searching for the perfect snare sound, which apparently is very hard to find. And every time we did find it, it somehow managed to escape again.

1,5 down, dozen (or so) to go.

Oh yeah, Porvoo is beautiful. Brunberg's chocolate and Ally's dinner <3
Tomorrow will pick up where we left, and maybe, just maybe, play some pöytälätkä.

2009-06-15T16:36:00.000-07:00

We're here.
Excited and tired.
But 98% excited.
Ally & Emppu rode their bikes here, and it took them around 5 hours.
Tomorrow we'll start working on songs.
We love this place.
We'll write some more tomorrow.
Now we sleep.

We recorded something

2009-05-29T02:30:00.000-07:00

Proper studio starting in 3,2,1... No, wait. In 2 weeks. Happy, excited and whatnot. Now get away from your computer and go outside, it's beautiful out there.
Tuomas/Ballet

Camping in the City

2009-03-30T14:42:00.001-07:00

Almost a month ago me and Eugene started to plan a trip to the country-side, thinking it would be a nice quiet place to finish our compositions for the upcoming album. Well, we took vacation from our offices and started to crawl through our phonebooks, hoping to find a kind person who would accomodate us to his/her cabin for a few days. Free of charge of course. Maybe we were a bit idealistic and out of luck (we won 20 euros from a pokerslot-machine earlier the same week). The plan didn't work and no-one agreed in our conditions. So here we were, out of job for a few days, and we decided to have a nice country-side-themed weekend in the city. In our nice little cabin near the centrum of Helsinki.

The songs take their time. That's why usually the first hours goes on playing all the crappy ideas out of your system. In this case it took the whole first day. I was still finishing the mixes of the africa-demos when Eugene finally arrived into the resort. We started playing quite late and no songs did appear on our minds or our fingers clearly. So I realized that the best thing to do was to go and check-out the local night-life of this exotic northern city. It was fun. I ended up at this art-school party near our accomodation. There played a good band (it was called Asa or something). I danced for a while all though this was not my dancing night. My moves where quite mellow.

The next day everything was better. We had some nice ideas, did one cool song, but then we ran out of cigarrettes. So we went to lend a camera, buy some cigarrettes and checked out the local transportational devices.

Travelling in the Country-side

Saturday night we tryed if our luck had changed and took part at the lottery draw. The win was 6.8 million. Yep, no luck yet. We should have never touched that pokerslot-machine.

The big forest

So sunday came. Everything was going swell, still we were a little late. We wrote a couple of songs and realized that our weekend had been a big succes. Almost all the songs are ready for the album, can't wait to go and try it with the band. We even wrote this one slow, almost classical, really depressing song. It sounds like a battlefield after the battle, a big graveyard. Panthéon.

Soldiers, heroes, husbands and wives, superhero-relationships, russian revolutions etc. are a few themes we've been writing our songs from. We weren't trying to make a theme album(with one fundamental theme that has to be on every song). The songs are quite diffent from each other and from our earlier work. And they are all new. We will be playing them live on may. Maybe release a couple of demos on the internet in a couple of weeks.
So things are going forward and it's all good. We are going to try and write here at least once in two weeks. Stay tuned as our bass player learns how to skate.

-Emil

Africa -sessions March 2009

2009-03-27T18:39:00.000-07:00

Almost four months since we have made a public appearance, sort of feels like we ought to get out from our hibernation back to where the sun is. Well, the shoes are being polished, shirts are ironed and what's most important we've spent this whole time writing new songs. Africa -sessions that are somehow awkwardly reported on our domestic ”finglish” are the latter recordings of the two 3-4 song demo preparations for the upcoming task of making an album.

After pimping up with the applegear we've managed to slowly move up in quality from the 4-track c-casette mastepieces through mp3 players to a new headaching comfroting life with garageband. It can do 8 tracks simultaneously, but we can't find the way to record several takes on one track as in protools, so it still is a ”live & learn” for us in the painful way.

So Africa -sessions started out with 7 tracks of drums and bass. Having a killer party celebrating our drummers visit to africa the day before did cause minor shaking, but gladly did not affect any playing skills (I guess we're not on that high level of playing yet). The songs we worked on are currently under the following code names:
Veterans
Superman (orkku)
Hold on
digidii

All four we're recorded pretty tight, but ”veterans” 'caused some wtf experience as we figured we've been playing the song with authenic bpm changes and believe me, garageband was definately not the tool for us to operate that thing. Though we gave it a thought to have the whole thing reprogrammed later on, we settled for the recording only to find how the electrodrums we were thinking of became impossible for us to work on. So it turned out as a quite an upbeat song, with a majestic David-Bowie-backing-vocal thing. I suggest you sit before listening to it, as it'll knock you out 100% guaranteed.

Ever since the battles on our first EP, some of our creativity has puffed out sideproducts that are essential for avoiding different stages of headaches and extrasweat. One of the things I'm definately proud of is the ”scarflistening”, then again I do believe that practicality (?) creates esthetics.

The album is called ”Panthéon” among us for now. I guess we have a thing for ”big things” going on. We have a studio booked for summer, but we're planning to release a single or two before June, we still really don't know what's happening with all the buzz in our ears. But what's important is that we've got new ladies waiting for their nights to shine and some special live dancing activity by Ville Tikka, which all sums to the fact that our few live shows are worth checking out if you're intrested in what we sound like now. Confirmed events are:

21.5 Kuudes linja w/ Lady Escape (who are also coming back from the studio)
1.7 Lepakkomies w/ Delay Trees & Kaskas (Trees have just released Soft Construction EP, which is something you should get your hands on)

Oh yeah, we met a Polish heavy metal band ”ŚMIERĆ” during our sessions, they we're friendly enough to pass us a photo:

While waiting for all the new stuff to emerge, you can visit following places:

http://www.myspace.com/delaytrees
http://www.myspace.com/ladyescape
http://www.myspace.com/rubikband (their upcoming second album out for listening)
http://www.myspace.com/theteamlove (or especially a band called ”a weather”)

And we'll continue climbing up the ladders.
All the love and a pleasant spring awakening for you guys and gals, see you soon!
<3<3<3>

-Eugene