Live at Studio Kekkonen series begins!

To celebrate our fifth anniversary, we at Studio Kekkonen are happy and proud to officially announce a new feature in our studio and this blog:

KEKKONEN ELÄÄ! - LIVE AT STUDIO KEKKONEN

Exclusive live-in-the-studio sessions with some of our favourite artists performing unreleased material - recorded, mixed and filmed at Studio Kekkonen!

Basically, we decided to sacrifice the final remains of our free time and do something that would be inspiring, interesting and fun! We ask our friends / artists / bands / clients to come and give us little live performances right here at Studio Kekkonen. We record and mix the performance and arrange it all to be filmed and edited, then we post the results here for your unlimited enjoyment - for free!

We ask the artists to pick a song (or more) that has not been released elsewhere, such as brand new songs, outtakes from albums, maybe unexpected cover songs, maybe avant-garde noise experiments or klezmer-versions of the first songs they ever wrote when they were 13, anything they feel is worth recording and sharing to the world in this format! It's up to the artist.

Of course cynics will point out that this idea is by no means new or original. Abbey Road does it. Nigel Godrich does it. YLE does it. Many others do it. Why should we do it?

Well, why should we not do it?
 
Firstly, lots of unbelieveably talented, interesting and generally cool and amazing and beautiful and wonderful people (see sidebar) visit our studio all the time, working with us on their records. A lot of the time that final record (and maybe a blurry photo) is the only remaining document of them spending time at Kekkonen - in a way fair enough, that's what we do here (excluding blurry photos)! But it'd be nice to have something more as well. Besides, those people very often become personal friends of ours, some very close. This is a great excuse to get together and do something nice!

Secondly, practically all of our clients love the atmosphere at the studio. They like spending time here, some have practically made it their living room. And hey, why shouldn't they, it's a fantastic and cosy place where there's always music in the air (accidental Twin Peaks reference), nice people and great coffee (that's Dale Cooper again)! Artists feel at ease in our studio. It's easy to get inspired here. It's nice to make music here. There's a vibe.

Thirdly, making records is not only about having fun (though most of the time it is GREAT fun!) - it's also really, really hard work. It's exhausting, stressful and consuming - especially at the final mixing stage which is where we do a lot of our work at Kekkonen. Then the aforementioned coffee often isn't a nice little treat, but an absolute necessity to keep going at unsociable hours for the umpteenth day in row. We wanted to create something that would be a sort of therapy or antidote to that stress for the artists (and maybe even for us?). A day of only the fun side of music-making! No outside pressure, no deadline, no worries. That's the way we want to approach this.

Fourthly, we like to try out new and exciting things! We've been here for five years and I think it's about time that we do stuff we've never done before. We all (as human beings do) spend lots of time on irrelevant, boring and anything-but-fun things in our spare time, so why not take the time and make the effort of doing something worthwhile musically, sonically and socially?

Finally, we love you - our dear blog readers, supporters, fans of our artists, record-buyers and other hippies - so much that we want to give you a special treat! We really hope you find our series of live sessions musically interesting, entertaining and of course great-sounding - and even visually pleasing - we decided to outsource the visual side of things to somebody who actually knows (unlike us) what he's doing with moving picture no matter how little space available (yes, yes, we ARE smaller than Abbey Road) - OP Komonen, who I got to know during the making of Anssi Kela's "Aukio" album, OP documented it all reality-style and even made a little music video of the lead single "Aamu".


The first session has been recorded and it'll see the light of day next thursday! So stay tuned to this blog and if you don't yet, follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook so you won't miss a beat!

And a little teaser of our first session, in the form of a (blurry!) photograph:

Who could these guys be? Not a very difficult mystery to solve, especially if you take a look at recent photos on our Facebook page...

We'll be announcing performers later (I DO like cliffhangers), but I promise you that they are the crême de la crême!

And just for the sake of repetition: the video will be published right here in our blog on October 13th (that's next thursday).

Juppu