Live @ Suuntimofest 2007
November 15th, 2007
On the 8th of September we had our very first festival gig: Suuntimofest at Helsinki. The scale of the event was nothing like Ruisrock or Provinssirock, but a festival anyway. I doubt that we even would be ready for the big stages of the big summer festivals. Anyway, click “read more” if you want to waste your time by reading a couple paragraphs of text.
We left to Helsinki at about noon because we had decided to skip sound check to get a few more hours of sleep. We packed our gear into our cars and pointed our noses towards Helsinki, had a short toilet pause after an hour of driving, yada yada yada. Nothing interesting or amazing there, nothing special happened, Jouni told bad jokes as usual.
I think the birds should improve their manners a bit.
”Backstage”
Ra (the band, not the Sun god of ancient Egypt) was just finishing when we arrived. The band members are something like 12 years old. You almost couldn’t see the drummer behind the bass drum, but then again, Ari is fairly well hidden behind his bass drum too so… Anyway, it was funny to watch the drummer carrying his bass drum case. The case was probably twice the size of the drummer. But you got to start young. After receiving our artist passes we headed on to the dining tent. They had really good tuna salad, I have to say. A cup of coffee warmed up a bit, since it was a pretty cold, cloudy and windy weather.
Profuse on stage.
The place was more crowded than Salon tori.
The event was running a bit late from schedule, so we helped the organisers by dropping one song off of our set (voluntarily, I might add). We decided not to play “Story Called My Life”, a good thing since for some reason I’ve been forgetting the lyrics of that song quite often. Morg played before us, really heavy music, a mixture of death and trash metal. Actually all the bands were quite metal, so I wasn’t completely sure we had booked ourselves to the right event… But anyway, after Morg ended their set, we quickly set up our gear. Ari had the hardest job, since he was using a drum set that included probably 10 tomtoms and 20 cymbals and all kinds of shakers and stuff. Somehow Ari managed to fit himself behind the set and we were ready to start.
Jouni is a busy man, doing business while waiting for the show to start.
“I’m the toughest guy of the block. Are you talking to me?!”
Could you be any more enthusiastic?
After the announcer had done her job and got off the stage we begun our set with “Stay Silent”, as usual. During the intro I tripped to my cables and almost fell. A good way to start a gig. Good thing it happened during the intro so I had time to get myself together since I was laughing pretty much at my own clumsiness. There were some problems with the cables too, my amp held a weird scratchy kind of noise in the beginning, but luckily it ended quite quickly. Maybe it had something to do with my tripping on the cables. Or maybe it wasn’t my guitar at all. We couldn’t really figure out precisely what/who to blame. It’s important to always have a scapegoat. I won’t go into monitoring, you can read from pretty much all of the previous stories what was the situation with them. We have a really problematic relationship, me and monitors. Before half way of the set the sun began to shine. Maybe we had the powers of Ra, go figure. Anyway, it was pretty hot on stage after that. The heating rays of the sun brought up another problem which I had expected: I couldn’t see anything from my tuner. It has lights flashing and blinking, but I saw absolutely nothing, the sun was shining way too bright. I tried to shade the tuner with a MacGyver-inspired cardboard-and-duct-tape –thingy but it didn’t do any good. Hopefully my guitar wasn’t completely out of tune. As if that wasn’t enough I somehow managed to cut myself during the gig so the strings were in blood. But I guess a gig is not a good gig if there’s no blood, sweat and tears shed.
The crowd seemed to like our music, at least we were a breath of fresh air with the other bands being so heavy/metal. And we got the sun to shine, that’s a pretty good accomplishment in my book. Our setlist was pretty basic, it has been quite stable for a while now. 362 is a nice song to play, one of our happy tunes definitely.
Setlist:
Stay Silent
Sanctuary
Night
Crash
Falling to Pieces
362
It All Went Wrong
Forever
After our show, we enjoyed the catering again. The food wasn’t anything fancy, but really, really good. I had another portion of tuna salad while Jouni and Johannes ate soup with minced meat, just as before the gig. Soon after the next band started to play, the clouds showed up again. Did I mention yet that we got the sun to shine? After a while it came so cold that we decided to head back to Turku. We even managed to invite ourselves to Jouni’s place for a sauna.
Ari and his famous robot dance. Can you feel the beat?
“Stop shooting and get in, we haven’t got all day!”
While the sauna was heating up we went to have a pizza. And yes, we had eaten just before we left back to Turku… Ari had other things to do, so he couldn’t make it to the “saunailta”, but the rest of us did. I ordered a pizza with three fillings, and surprisingly only one of the fillings was wrong. I am not a big fan of moldy cheeses, in fact I really don’t like them. I guess you already guessed that one of the fillings in my pizza was moldy cheese. Nice.
Is it really late, or really early…
That’s Suuntimofest 2007 in a nutshell. Same time next year!
-Kari