FUZZ Guitar show - new guitar!

On April 18 we were at the FUZZ Guitar Show in Göteborg. Lots of people, lots of nice stuff and some awesome performances! Just like Sweden Rock Festival it often turns out as a sort of family gathering where you meet people you know but have never actually met in person. I bumped into Jonas Hörnqvist (ace guitarist of Trasure Land) whom I've known for years, but never actually talked other than on the phone and mail. Also met some of the guys from Hellspray, Vindictiv guitarist Stefan Lindholm, Disdain guitarist Gunnar Hård af Segerstad etc.
We saw the performaces of Freak Kitchen and Micke "Nord" Andersson. Freak Kitchen played a short 30+ minute set with some old favourites like "Taste My Fist", "Silence" etc., a GREAT set but far too short. No new songs were played as Ia figured they would be Youtubed in only a few hours. Micke did an awesome acoustic set with his interpretations of songs by, for instance JJ Cale. It's interesting to see a performance by somone you know well, have recorded and written with, but never actually seen in this context and with this type of material. Outstanding!
I met up with my friend Anders Thidell at True Temperament who introduced me to his new "invention", the B-tuned True Temperament guitar. Holy crap!!! So heavy!!! They are building one for me "as we speak".
Also met Hasse Danzon (formerly Johansson, singer of Million) who got me involved in their new, and highly interesting, musical site Crank It Up (www.crankitup.se) which will be launched this summer.

Currently listening to:
JESSE JAY JOHNSON - Play That Damn Guitar - Another ace Grooveyard release!
SAGA - The Human Condition - Gotta ger used to the new singer!
IMPELLITTERI - Wicked Maiden - No bad at all!
SLAMER - Nowhere Land - Mike Slamer rules!
TRUCKFIGHTERS - Mania - Swedish stoner

Back from Japan!

Returned back from a totally outstanding trip to Japan just a few days ago. Takes time to digest all the impressions!


Some things I will surely miss are:


1. The way the Japanese people show respect for their fellow man. No prejudice, no sneering, no looking down at others. Just a very, very friendly and helpful people!

2. The clean streets. Hardly no waste baskets, despite this people don't throw crap on the street!

3. No graffitti! You can actually see the colour the walls were intended to be painted in. No f**cking badly painted signatures, dirty words or amateur paintings. Nice, clean walls!


We met some wonderful new and old friends! Thanks to Naoko Furuhashi, Mitsuhiro Nishida, Hiroko Hayashi, Yasu Fuji, Mikitoshi at Rock Stakk, Yushi at Soundholic, Tomo Ando etc. You really made our stay a memorable time!

The interviews with Burrn! and Captain Wada went great thanks to Yushi and their great interpreter. I did some rockin' out at Club Crush where I played live to "Swords & Axes" (some of the stuff I hadn't played since 1984!). See below :-)

Bought almost 100 CDs and some vinyls! Had to ship some stuff by mail to avoid expensive overweight!

Air France and especially Charles De Gaulle airport SUCKS! Rude staff, totally unorganized and no sense of logistics and efficiency whatsoever!


The bottom line, though - Japan rocked and we will be baaaak!!


Current list of goodies:
1. FIREBIRD - "Grand Union" - Outstanding new album by this retro-trio
2. VINNIE MOORE - "To The Core" - About time! Good instrumental!
3. SAGA - "The Human Condition" - Strange to hear the band w a new singer, but it works!

Why not write another book?

Well, that's the question I came up with after having a meeting with my publisher last week. I'm in the middle of working on my new, third, encyclopedia of Swedish hard rock & heavy metal. We had a very fruitful meeting where we set up all the criterias for the new book.

1. It will contain all bands from the first two books, updated, completed, corrected and all bands I've missed out, plus all the new entries. All in all over 2500 bands!
2. We also decided this time it will be in all colour! I mean, with all these wonderful colourful covers, it just has to be in colour!
3. All bands that are "related" or "on the edge" will be presented in a simpler way, still with members, home town and discography, but only relevant releases and no bio. This will weed out a lot of bands verging on punk, pop, progg or whatever.
4. It will contain a listening companion, like Premium Publishing's other releases, a 4 CD long box.

We also decided on a deadline - the book is to be finished in December for an early 2010 release.

My aim was also to have a short "history of Swedish hard rock" in the book, but after a little consideration and thinking about what I wanted to include... it became a separate book. I am working on this one simoltaneously and it will contain:

1. The history of the Swedish hard rock, from the first careful steps in the late 60s, through the growing 70s, the hair metal 80s, the death metal and alternative 90s to today.
2. Interviews with high profile musicians, managers, journalists, labels.
3. Excerpts from interviews I've done myself since the 80s.
4. Unpublished photos and fun information.

The aim is for this book to be released also in 2010.

Listening to:
1. LION'S SHARE - "Dark Hours" - just put it on right now, so we'll see :-)
2. PUGH ROGEFELDT & RAINROCK - "Bolla & Rulla" - Hard rock? Hmmm...
3. THIRD EYE - "Hardware" - Great funk 'o metal feat Stevie Salas, Bootsy Collins and Buddy Miles.

Japan - here we come!

Around this time next week, I and my fiancée are on a plane to Narita, Japan. After having been to the US (San Fransisco and New York) three years in a row we figured it was time for something different. I've always been interested and fascinated by Japan, ever since I ordered my first Lazy, Bow Wow and Flied Egg albums from Heavy Sound Records. Then when we (Locomotive Breath) finally got a deal with Avex Records in 1997 we figured there may be a chance to get our asses over there. Didn't happen. So, when planning our vacation my fiancée suggested Japan. Great idea! The trip was quite affordable and so are the hotels (about same, even a bit cheaper, than New York). Fortunately we have some friends to help guide us in this mysterious country (Thanks in advance to Naoko Furuhashi, Mitsuhiro Nishida and Yasu Fuji).

Our (Overdrive's) Japanese label Soundholic has set up some interviews while I'm there (Burrn!!, Captain Wada) which will be great. My friends Mitsuhiro and Yasu have promised to find us some nice record stores in Yokohama and Osaka. The only concern may be overweight, but there's always the option of posting some of the purchases back home.

Last weekend I spent in Stockholm with Micke "Nord" Andersson and his lovely wife and author Karin Alvtegen. Mikael and I are writing songs for his forthcoming solo album. We managed to get five songs roughly demoed and stylewise we ended up somewhere between early Aerosmith, AC/DC and Robin Trower with a twist. Writing with Mikael is highly rewarding!

The Constancia album is now mastered and ready, we're just waiting for some input from the label on which song to use as bonus track, plus we still have some band pics to finish up.

New recommendable stuff I'm listening to:
ELECTRIC MARY - "Down To The Bone" - Thanks to Joe "The Groovayard Dawg" Romagnola for puttint me onto this gem!!
ROGOSONIC - "Leave The World Alone" - Great riffing Americans!
TY TABOR - "Balance" - What can I say? Ty rules as always!!
COLDSPELL - "Infinite Stargaze" - One of the best releases so far this year!

Interesting problem...

We've just recorded an album with the band CONSTANCIA where the members live in Sweden (Malmö, Stockholm, Karlshamn and Mörrum) and Germany (Münster). We've also just signed a deal with a great Italian label! Now, the twist to the story is that all the members have actually never met! For instance the drummer and singer have never met the bass player and vice versa. The singer hasn't met the keyboard player. Still I think we've really managed to get a great band-feel to the album, basically because we have recorded and then re-recorded some stuff to adjust to what someone else has recorded. I re-recorded a lot of my guitars for the third time after all the vocals were done. It has really paid off!
Now, here comes the tricky bit! The label now want 10 band pics! Uhuh... We managed to get it down to five at this stage, but we still have to fix 5 band pics! So, this weekend I, the drummer and the singer will meet and take a bunch of pics which we will then send to the drummer and keyboard player so they can have their photos taken in the same style and with the same background (preferably white...) and try to "pose" to make it fit with our pics. After this our singer David (who is great at Photoshop) will merge us all together and fix 5 band pics!
The beauty of today's technology :-)

Currently listening to:
CLUTCH - "From Beale Street To Oblivion" - Great riffage!!
COLDSPELL - "Infinite Stargaze" - Swedish debut of the year so far!
BLACK PEARL - s/t - Lisa Tingle rules!!
BLACK SABBATH - "Tyr" - Not their best, but just had to listen to it again

Swedish metal (or not....?)

I'm currently, besides recording a zillion albums and writing for the mags, working on my third encyclopedia of Swedish Hard Rock 6 Heavy Metal. I've come across a shitload of Swedish bands from the 70-90s I seem to have missed out since Vol 2. I've been quite "generous" in my decisions of what should be included and what should not. Some have critizised me for being "too kind", meaning this and that band is not heavy enough to be featured. Well, I've basically been using collectors as a base for what to include. However now it seems the borders have been even more stretched. Especially by people selling records. "Super rare Swedish metal, not even in the book" it said about one record I had actually excluded because it was not hard rock. Yes, it had the occasional distorted guitar, but the music was pop/disco. I recently came across web auctions with another bunch of stuff I had missed out on, all of them labeled as "Swedish metal/hard rock". I contacted the guy who was nice enough to let me come to his home and check out the stuff. I ended up buying five singles, of which one clearly made it into the book, while the others were borderline cases which I finally decided to include. The rest of the stuff however did not pass the needle's eye. Still - he labeled them "hard rock/metal" and the prices I can assure you were quite outrageous. Some of them were simply rock or power pop, not even AOR. If I had bought these records unheard this guy would have received quite an irritated mail from me, I can assure you.

"Rare" is not the same as "great" and I'm a bit tired of people stirring up interest and prices for stuff that obviously sucks, just because the band only sold 5 copies and threw away the rest of them because noone was interested. There ARE gems out there, but this type of bahaviour makes it harder to find (or chance) on those gems.

Well, I've found some really good stuff that were hiding under the bushes :-)

Current Swedish finds:

VON PANZER - s/t - Great heavies! http://www.vonpanzer.com/

COLDSPELL - "Infinite Stargazer" - Great heavy melodic

ADAMS EVE - s/t - Great Extreme type funkish harc rock

JOKE - two albums out!

The pre-mix/demo disease

Right now the CONSTANCIA album is being mixed by Fredrik Folkare. We have just received the first version and it sounds awesome! However there's always one disturbing thing, which is my own fault. When I've finished a recording I make a, very rough and very raw, pre-mix. It's not even worth calling a mix actually, more like getting the levels up, some odd delay and compressor on some tracks. It's more of a rough mix I do to check that everything sounds fine before the final mix. Sitting in the mixing room and finding out parts are missing, files are corrupt or there are clicks on the tracks, is not good (to put it mildly). So, I compile all the tracks, clean them up, bounce them to one nice file per track starting at the same starting-point. Then I mix it down to a track, burn it onto a CD and listen the hell out of it to detect and remove any errors before it's too late.
The problem is, when I get the final mix my brain is so set on the pre-mix sound I tend to listen for the wrong things. I've grown to love that really dry and in your face sound, so when I get the final mix I need at least 4-5 times before I "adjust" and reset my brain. Then I can listen unbiased.
It sort of the same way with demo-solos. Some of the best guitar solos are on demos and it's totally impossible to recreate them in the studio. Therefore I now always record the demos with a proper solo sound and to a click, so it's possible to use it in the final recording. Sometimes you get that special feel, tone, lick or whatever that just seems impossible to recreate.

Favourites of the week:
WOLF - Devour - Classic metal!
OPETH - Watershed - Damn this is a great album!!
BLACK PEARL - s/t - Forgotten gemm with Lisa Tingle on vox!
IL ROVESIO DELLA MEDAGLIA - Io Come Io - Killer Italian prog!