Huh, not too active with the diary it seems.

Ohh the evening went quite far surfing online before I got to leave to town, and even then I missed the bus ;) Well, I was around in Nitetrain a bit after the opening of doors and I managed to get done with all the preforming tasks from guestlist to the check-through of backstage and technical scheduals. Akcent the band itself had been one hour late when coming from Helsinki airport to Tampere, but they had managed to move to Mietaa NS in Kurikka after their interviews and they had got to start their gig there right on time at 22:15. Meanwhile I loaded the drinks to the fridge to cool 'em up and enjoyed the break along in a company of friends :)
The band came to Tampere at 01:30am and the gig started at 02am, eventually with the Kylie hit and the club bursted in to a yell tearing your ears. Their set had many new tracks, but somewhere in between we also had to chant along "Dragostea Din Tei" as an accapella version as well. Naturally the set began and ended with the Kylie hit, and I bet the neighbourhood around the club had been amazed how the whole block was shattering and the air ventilation horns brought in a noise of one thousand people chanting to "KYLIE GIVE ME JUST A CHANCE LET'S GO OUT AND DANCE!" ;D
I tried to shoot photos and managed to get a few good ones too :) During the set I placed a couple of new CDs on the light jockey's desk, so that it would be easier for me to take the photos, but some damned person had stolen the CDs from the desk a bit later on :( Anyways the Akcent gigs went through with such success that we can book them for gigs in the future as well!

The travel from Tampere to Vaasa took closer to 4 hours by car including the pit stop we had at Juustoportti ("Cheeseport", what a coherent name and it made me interested already .. and they had a real 1:1 sized plastik cow inside their entry way!) After reaching the destination and driving around we finally found a place for parking; on a valley between the hotel and a building, which had a nasty looking back door saying "Pink Lady" (this time I chose to go to the hotel though). We carried the gear in to the club and checked in at the reception meanwhile the other band Avide, a group of 6 girls, were doing their sound check. The soundcheck needed to be done quickly but we got over with it though.
The backstage was equipped with 4 cases of beer and cider along 24 cans of energy drinks, fruits and some salty snacks and since the girls weren't enjoying their part of the drinks, this is where our "road manager" Sebu and "super-keyboardist" Olli came in handy! The gig began right after 1am and I was surprised of the amount of people we still had in house despite the fact that we had a serious competitor at another club nearby; Swedish (?) dance group September who are really big throughout Scandinavia at the moment. We kicked in as usually but this time we didn't face such problems as on the previous gig.. Only technical problem I faced myself was during dancing on stage and stepping on the mic wire, which caused the mic to get unplugged enchanted with a big "snap" through the PA. A friend in the front row dove to get the missing wire and handed it back to me for plugging the wire back in with a larger "bang!" through the PA, and I made sure it won't happen again.. we've earlier had wireless mics on all our gigs but experience is always welcome ;) The best reactions with audience were once again given during the original version of "Flying High" and encore of our new song "Poor Romeo".
After the gig we spent some time at the backstage exchanging ideas and thoughts and then partying the rest of the evening at the club. When the doors closed we invited the staff to drink with us, so we stayed at the club until 6am. When going back to our hotel rooms I found a mobile phone from the entrance of the elevator. After a quick browse through of the names I thought the owner was obviously a musician and there were only a couple of such dudes on our floor.. The other one even came talking with me at the club (the guy was soooo wasted with booze) and I was sure it's his phone; He was a drunken basist after all ;) Some chick called the phone at 6:30am and I had a 10min gossip with her, such a nice gal. Then I went sleeping, just to wake up at 8:50 when the phone rang again and I heard someone at the hall way yelling "I can hear it, it comes from this room". Then there was a knock on the door and I went half naked to open it with the cell in my hand offering the knocker (who actually was the basist guy!) the phone "this must be yours" .. and he was so enlighted of having it back I felt a ring of valour above my head when I headed back to sleep. Then after an hour my own phone woke me up, because it was time for breakfast at the hotel's restaurant. Once again loading a pile of that tasty bacon on my plate and I was ready to drool. At the end of the breakfast there were only us four and a couple (?) at the next table.. The woman seemed to be the singer of September and some waiter spend a nice while talking with them about this and that. Nice to realize they were staying at the same hotel :)
It was time to have some more sleep, since we had got a permission to enlenghten the keep of our room by few hours, so at 14:30 we got up and packed our stuff. Driving back took a nice while again and after 19:00 I was back at the studio, ready to go to party at Nitetrain again. During the first hour I lost my own mobile phone and I couldn't find it anywhere, so I called the phone company and told them to prevent outgoing calls and messages from my lost phone. I was a bit down for the rest of the evening thinking I need to get a new phone etc. but when I was getting my jacket back from the wardrope I also got my phone back, since some nice girl had found it and returned it to the door men. I consider it being quite rare that somebody actually returns a phone after finding one, but it's even more rare thinking I had just found a phone and returned it myself not even 24 hours earlier! Irony of some sort, but in a good way :)

Hohooh now this was one wild gig on the loose!
After a dozen calls for figuring out how to quickly get 4 wheels under us, we finally got the car packed and headed towards Espoo for our DCX gig at Club Fennia. We even got exactly in time despite the rush and delays, and settling up the gear went all nicely. The problems began when the light jockey realized due to light controller they can't control the moving lights, which create around 50% of the visual outlook of the stage. Solving how to get them move just randomly around in a test mode took a couple of hours and after that everything looked good to go again. The stage was relevantly big and the place was nicely crowded.
We were invited to the stage by Dj Roy (thx to him part of the visual side was saved with his work on the house's own lights, which by the way were more better equipped than at any other club I've seen in Finland) at around 01:15 and the floor was okay thinking the vast majority of people were elder than the crowd we are used to (quite a lot of 40+ people in the house). The first few tunes showed us it's a lot harder to get these people move and scream than on earlier gigs. The show was good though and obviously people on the floor were in to it. During our fourth track my synth went totally ballistic during the play by switching to different sound, which sounded like a sonic blast through the PA. This even happened twice and I'm still unsure why the sound changed all of a sudden.
In the middle of performing our strong classic track "The choice is yours" as a nostalgic pick, I was dancing on the stage and unfortunately kicked the electric cable of the power unit of our dj-mixer, and there we lost the backing track. Olli kept on playing and Katri sang as if it was meant as an "unplugged" part of the show. Meanwhile I checked with the sound engineer, who had teleported himself to the stage in a split second, to find out what went wrong. The problem was quickly fixed, so I kept calculating the track in my head and threw in the volume of the backing track at solo, were I instantly continued with robotic rap-singing. (I asked about this afterwards and the resident deejay hadn't noticed any problems .. but some girl in the crowd yelled at us "nobody realized something went wrong!" :D)
Then we continued with the classic euro version of "Flying High", thinking now everything's good again, just for me to realize a bit before the second verse that the battery of my wireless mic had went down. I was like "okay 1.5 seconds to my part on vocals, what should I do, what should I do??" and I jumped over to Katri, took her mike and started emceeing while I was still on the fly :D And there came the technician back to the stage with manners of a stinger missile and started fixing the problem with the mic. We did a quick swap with mics right before Katri's part on chorus started over. We really had fun on the stage laughing at the whole situation how ridiculously technical side can go down, but nothing can stop us from performing! :D
During encore with "Poor Romeo" I took a look on the mixer and I saw the meter was showing the left channel only. "Now what is this sh*t again?" I thought and by touching the wiring I noticed the plug was somewhat on loose, but I couldn't fix it since the whole PCB of the mixer was broken. So I tried my best playing on right hand meanwhile fixing the plug with left hand and trying to see if the meter shows everything would be back good again. This was something I couldn't fix but fortunately it was nothing lethal for the show anyways, because the sound engineer had switched the backing track's channels to mono at this point.
After the gig we got to the backstage and laughed about the whole thing how things can get almost out of hand, but we were pleased about the way it all got handled despite the quick problems. It could've been one hell of a disaster for a gig, but somehow we fought it all through

Last night I went to hit the road with my friend Katri right after midnight to face a regular party at a club in Hämeenlinna, around 100km from here. There were other options too (like seeing Marusha live at a local rave and I even had free ticket to the event) but I chose something else. And it wasn't a bad choice even though we only had 2 hours to spend there, for it was all nice variation against the common saturdays. I even managed to get back home by 6am again :]

I actually went partying in Hämeenlinna for the first time in New Year. There were a few options for the evening back then too, and I chose to go there just to meet up a girl I knew through MSN and who I had never seen in real life. She was going to a party at her friend's home somewhere, but she didn't know where, so I got more instructions during my travel there. I had nothing to expect, so there were no plans that could've gone wrong. When I stepped off from the train I found my way to the city-map, but got left unable to locate the suburb I was looking for. I approached a cab-driver and asked for the location of the place, and he told me the best way to get there is to go by bus (now this is some customer service, he didn't want to take me there by his taxi because the bus was a lot cheaper!). Then I looked out for a bus, and voilá, there came the bus nr #1 at the very moment! I asked for where it's heading at and was amazed to hear it was going straight to the place I was looking for. What made me more fortunate in this case was that the next bus to the suburb would've been more than one hour away. Also the driver was very kind and did some phone calling to solve out the address of the party place for me. He left me out from the bus and informed me with the right walking instructions, so that I could find to the correct block. There I was standing in front of the house wondering whether it was the right one, and then the girl called me. "Yes I'm in the city now but I don't know about my location.. I'm just walking somewhere all around here.." - I saw a group of around ten youngs and someone came to open the door to the hallway. I sneaked in to the group and decided to follow them thinking "wherever they are heading to, there must be a party, so let's not miss this" and I kept on with the phone. I went in to some apartment with the posse and told Jenni (the girl on the phone) that I had gone in to some party and I will call later on. I didn't know anybody from there and I wasn't sure where I am, but then somebody reckognized me and my surprize got fulfilled meanwhile I said "hi, I brought some friends with me" pointing at the group I didn't know :D I had found my way to the right place just by accident and soon in no time there were a bunch of new friends :) The evening went splendid by partying at the homeparty and at the local club Metropol. In the late hours our group of three faced the need to find a place to stay overnight, since the weather was going really bad, and I mean REALLY bad. It was -25'C, storming ice and the wind was hectic. Hanna (the other friend) even fell down by the strength of the "wall of ice" that came along with the wind. But the luck was still along and this is where our good pal Tatu came in through phone inviting us to his place, where we stayed with sauna and stuff with bunch of even more new friends until the next evening. It sure was a night to remember with all the luck I had with me and once again I got a reminder for not to make too much plans over things :) Thanks to all you guys who let me join the parties, and especially Lissu for hosting the party :)


A week ago we had our best DCX gig so far by performing on the NRJ Sugartour at night club Sokeri in Tampere. The show went on a totally new level after I grabbed the mic a few weeks ago on our gig in skicenter Ellivuori and we threw in a couple of old eurodance tracks with coherent emceeing stuff to spicen up the performance. A year ago I really did swear I would never rap on any of the songs myself anymore, but one should always be careful about the words to say. The world is missing this sort of bands with old school eurodance emceeing, so we are shaping our show with unique add-ons and it really warms up the crowd for good. Not to mention it's friggin fun too! :D


Apart from gigs we've been on a 4 week pause from music production due to studio renovations. The control room is now fixed, so we'll let the productions continue. Stay tuned! ;)

I'm starting a new section on the website as a blog for more personal content and at the same time I'm trying to avoid letting the personal website go too business-wise. This invasion of strict business information has caused the number of visitors to go down during the last year, so I'm bringing this new part for those friends of mine who followed up also other things than just what's going on with the music biz. Of course releasing so few web-releases a year affects the number of website visitors, so I'll try to do something about that, too.
Expect to read memos, party reports and logs about gigs and raves here in the future, stay tuned! ;)