Oct 24th
9:00 I have the apartment ready for the invasion of musicians. What a great and unique line up we will have for this session. I have high expectations that we will reach some levels of Mahvishnu Orchestra! We will see.. The Swedes from Stockholm are already on the road now and I will pick up Hasse from Norway at the airport at 15:15 today.. I have not seen him in 16 years! We have been in contact all these years but never played together.. Exciting.

The Players:

Jonathan (Camper von Beethoven, Hieronymus Firebrain, Dent, Jack and Jill, many bands)
Hasse (Tangle Edge)
KG (Siena Root, Palace on Wheels)
Mathias (Makoladama, Gösta Berlings Saga, My Brother the Wind, Dean Allan Floyd)
Jonas (Agusa)
Mats (freelancer)
Alex (Gösta Berlings Saga)
Dr Space (ØSC, Gas Giant, Black Moon Circle)

11:30 Sabine arrives from Hamburg and has all the IAAD records now. I have the place more or less ready for people. They came and picked up David Grahams package so now I am free to go to the store if necessary.

14 I took a short nap and Sabine and I did some misc things. I started the Indian curry now with help from Clotho and Sabine.. Chickpea and later a Salmon with Goji berries and rice and rotis.

15:00 Off to the airport to pick up Hasse from Norway. It will be great to see him after 16 years. He arrived on time and is in a good mood. He actually walked out just as I arrived.

16:30 Jonas and Mats have arrived and are in a good mood. I have spent some time trying to find an extra parking card from the neighbors but with no luck so the Swedes have to try to find a place on the street. Food is coming along well.

17:30 Mathias, Jonathan and KG have now arrived and parked the van. It was a long drive for them but they are all in a good mood. All the food is ready so we will eat and head straight out to the studio.

19 It is a bit crazy in the studio as we have an enormous amount of gear and where to set up and we are limited to 24 channels and we will need everyone.

Drums 7 channels
Hand Drums Stereo channel
Dr Space- 2 channels
KG- 2 channels
Hasse- bass 2 channels
Jonas- 4 channels
Jonas guitar 1 channel
Jonathan amp 2 channel
Mats- 2 channel

21 We are running behind. I have just got back with Alex from the airport. It was a zoo, so many people at the airport and his plane was 15mins late. I had to pay 45kr for parking. If he had come on time, I might have managed in the free parking. Great to see him and he is in a great mood.

22 We are nearly there but Mats is having a lot of problems and it seems the Park amp has died now and he has to switch to the Fender. He also has some very strange and weird way he has to set up his gear that seems unnecessarily complex but it has to be that way.. The sound in the PA is good but Jonas still had some sound issues with his keyboard set up.

23:30 We are all tired and it is still not perfect as we never all played at the same time and we don’t know what it will sound like with us all playing and the PA. Synths seemed quite loud. I always worry about bleed in the drum mics, especially. We will see.

00:00 I am crashing out but the rest are still having a party. Hope they do not stay up too late. They eat the rest of the Indian food and have some beers and a joint.

Day 2

7:00 I am up already and will get the others up at 8:30 at the latest. We told Lars we are back at 10:30…

10:14 We just finished putting the Burg Herzberg multitrack files on a memory stick for Mats and then we will go. Everyone had breakfast and many had showers and the mood is really good. We heard some Dead Pan alley band (new one) and Jerry Reed and some of the Music of Pogonologist (people thought it sounded great..)..

11:16 Lars was on time but Mats had to sort out all is stuff still so we could not start right away.

13:00 We started the day with a pretty cool laid back sitar, pedal steel, violin jam but Jonathan also played mandolin (I think) and an amazing guitar solo at the end. I can’t really hear anything Jonas plays except the organ. Sound in the PA is not that ideal. People have trouble to hear the bass in the other room… I can hear it well though as I am closest. We did another uptempo jam next with Hasse on the bass, he played African drums on the first. He and Alex make a good rhythm duo..

15 We had a bit of a break and made some sandwiches and had humus with pita breads.. I brought 24 cokes and 48 beers and they are slowly being consumed. Seems the technical part of the recording is going very well. I can’t document it all but there is a lot of instrument changes with different people playing bass, guitar, organ, etc… I have struggled to find any really great sounds on the OSCar, which is a bummer so rely a lot on the Octave Cat and modular synth. Mathias is really tired and sat out one jam.. it was a beautiful one and the pedal steel would have been great…. Maybe later…

15:50 We just got back from a walk down to the water and short visit to the Mantric Muse rehearsal room. They are all doing great and Ola was there as well. They have a gig Nov 8th, the first this year. A private party.

21:00 I did not find the time to write a lot of notes. Mats and I went out and got pizza and falafels for people (462kr) and then we had a really cool digestive raga with sitar, pedal steel and mandolin, again with hand drums. I think Jonas played the bass. Mats played some cool keyboard sounding guitar stuff. The last jam was a very heavy hard rocking one after we had a couple of far out experimental pieces with crazy synths. Mats played an amazing solo in this one. I think we had 8 jams this day for about 4 hrs of recording. The longest one was 71mins and two around 40. Sabine has been doing a great job and has filmed most of all the jams. I have also filmed some with my old camera and clotho’s.. See what we can do with it..

Day 3

7:00 We changed the clocks so it used to be 8. I am up early though but went to bed at 10:30., The others were still hanging out and drinking beers in the kitchen. I hope they did not stay up too late. I think everyone had a great time and the mood was good. We plan to meet at 10 and play until about 17. Pack up the gear and get back to my place and make pasta for dinner…. Start with another raga…. Maybe end with one as well. I will take a shower and go to the store. Get some more bread for breakfast and lunch. Maybe coffee as well for the studio as we are almost out of cokes. See what happens today.. I am excited. Lars seems to think we have made some very cool music..

9:00 We are cleaning up from breakfast now and the mood is really great. We have been listening to the Cosmic Dead, 3rd Ear Experience and lastly BONG… I was actually surprised that most everyone like the BONG and we agreed to start the session with a doom drone piece.

11:15 Wow.. We just had this amazing Doom drone piece that lasted about 50mins that I felt was just incredible… I think the overall feeling was cool and that it was a really interesting slow evolving piece. Most of it was filmed. We never recorded anything like that before..

12:08 We just had a delay guitar jam that was directed by mats that started and ended with some cool violin by Jonathan. KG and Mathias sat out this one and from their point in the control room they thought it was one of the best jams. Now we have some beer and lunch..

12:58 This I thought was a very special and beautiful piece of music with real country pedal steel and sitar.. Just a floating and magical piece of music. Everyone was very focused. Jonathan and I did not play on this one until towards the end.

15:15 This piece was very different with Mats on Piano, Jonas on guitar, me and Hasse on bass. Alex did come in on drums but a bit too late… Very different, a sort of interlude piece we could use somewhere… Mats said it was his new age influences coming out. We will probably only have one more jam and call it a day as people are running out of ideas but we need to go out with another high energy piece of music.

16:30 We are done and had one last really great jam that lasted about 40mins. A lot of cool dynamics and it nearly ended but then Jonathan would not let it die and we took it backup once again for a really nice finish. Great playing from everyone.

This was a great session and very diverse music came out. It will be very hard to mix with all these instruments but that will be the challenge to bring the magic out… Mood was really great. Jonathan was quite internet addicted and on the computer all the time when we were not playing. Others were drinking tea, coffee, coke, beer and just listening back in the control room. It was a great time and no conflicts just pure music……

A lot of video was shot and I also did some short 5mins interviews with everyone and I still need to do an intro one with myself and introducing the band, the session, etc.. but there is plenty of time. It will be a long time before we have enough of this mixed to put together with the video. Patience…. Thanks to Sabine for filming and shooting pictures..