Month: April 2025

Path of a Composer Chapter VI: Discordia – Grip!

Welcome on a journey! I call it the Path of a Composer. The idea is to post key pieces of my music from along the years and hopefully put some light on how I have developed aesthetically, in my craftsmanship and of course also artistically — resulting in these days where I am finally ready to proudly launch myself as a composer of modern art music. It is time for Chapter VI.

Discordia: Grip! (Taken from the album Season Changes, 2014)

Chapter V was about me getting symphonic for the first time with the Strive or Warp album. The exhausting task of doing so much of the work all by myself left me valuing collaboration and seeing it in a new light.

I cannot remember how I joined Discordia again. At least I cannot remember whether they asked me or I asked them. All I know is that whoever suggested it, we all thought very fast it was a good idea. Discordia had gone through some changes and they had a second guitarist Timo “Sande” Sandholm; Liisa the keyboard player had also left the band — so it was a turning point anyway when I rejoined.

We all wanted to create another album. Everyone agreed that I would be the musical leader of the band and produce the new album. In return I would make sure the musical interests of every member would be taken into account. In addition to lead vocals, I also started to play the keyboards which I think was a role that suited me. After some time also Riikka joined the band to share the lead vocals and sing some choirs with me.

Compared to the Utopia Perfection lineup, this new Discordia was different. With the new guitarist Sande the new material had gotten much heavier with sound. The rock playing of the band was tight and excellent. I got great kicks from the playing right away. With Sande there were all of a sudden 3 composing members in the band. Like before, it was fascinating to collaborate on the compositions. Most often I took the riffs of the guitarists, put them into some structure and created the vocal melodies and rhythms, along with new textures and polyphonic lines. The album Season Changes ended up having 7 songs: I collaborated on 3 songs with Antti Tolkki and 3 songs with Sande and 1 song was purely mine: Grip!

I remember starting to compose Grip! — which ended up being arguably my longest and greatest progressive rock piece. Yes, I was very thrilled with playing of the band and the idea of having two excellent guitarists was very inspiring. I already knew the playing of Petri and Otto (and the singing of Riikka and myself) so Grip! was all about creating something challenging, rewarding and awe-inspiring specifically for this very band.

So my starting point for the song was the dialogue of the two heavy guitars, separated in the stereo picture. I perceived them kind of the same way as two antiphonal string sections of the symphony orchestra. Add to the picture the melodic bass playing and my keyboards which included rock organ, strings and piano, and the vocal harmonies, and Otto´s versatile and high energy drum playing, there we had the basic ingredients. I felt that here was a band that could execute my wildest rock and roll and progressive rock dreams. So I went for it!

For Strive or Warp my focus and ambition was strongly related and attached to classical music. Season Changes album was my return to rock. So is the 13 minutes long Grip!. It was all about the pure enjoyment of rock playing, energy and sound. Think about the repeated build-up chord progression of the finale part: E minor, G major, B major and C major. No classical note leading, oh no! Just the pure enjoyment of lifting the chords up and up like blocks with raw distorted guitar arpeggios. And to have choirs on top of it eventually, mixed with trills… I love it!

Then again it is also obvious that the long form was heavily influenced by classical music. The work is set in a kind of mixture of the sonata and variation form — plus also the Sibelian “rotation form” introduced by James Hepokoski comes to mind. I perceive traits of all the 3 forms in the work. There are multiple elements I rotate into focus time and time again in a different light along the 13 minutes of the work. For example the main theme is first introduced on the guitars and later reintroduced as a choral canon for the middle section and in the end sung by the lead vocalists.

Another important element of Grip! is the lyrics. When I started to compose and write the piece, I had some health issues. At first it was not clear for me or the doctors what caused these strange sensations of the nervous system but it felt like I was loosing physical control of my body. It felt like sinking into sometimes total physical insecurity where I doubted the functioning of my body. The lyrics are about me trying to get a grip and also for the first time having to face my own mortality and trying to deal with it.

In the end a benign tumour was found and operated. I haven´t had a single panic attack or strange sensation since the operation. But the experience of the sensations in my nervous system was absolutely awful and I cannot really explain what it felt like. Something about the panic and the experience can indeed be heard in Grip!. I think these lyrics are amongst my best. I feel like I have expressed something existential both musically and lyrically.

Like in many of my works there are strongly contrasting elements and ambitions juxtaposed in Grip!. The pure joy and energy of rock is set against the anxiety and expression of the lyrics. It is a strange combination. It is creates a picture of an individual doing his absolute best in trying to figure out what is happening and to regain a control of his life.

Musically Season Changes is completely different from Utopia Perfection, I think. Utopia Perfection was more ironic and tongue in cheek 70´s glam prog rock. There was no glam in Season Changes, it was much heavier and it was way more serious. It is no wonder that some people highly prefer the first album and some people highly prefer the later album. I for one cannot decide and neither do I have to. But Grip! sure is my best rock song of all time. I am immensely proud of it. Also the band has always been proud of pulling it off and learning all the 107 pages of the complicated partiture — and they should be! It was a wonderful thing to achieve together and everybody´s work, skill and insight was needed and put to use.

Pretty much like the previous time, after finishing Season Changes I already had plans and material for the next album and I started to push for it. Musically I just couldn´t stop… Not everyone are hardwired that way. So inevitably after Season Changes the band rather soon disbanded all together. The recording was a great achievement and it was great fun but it was too much for people who eventually wanted more the fun and social part of it all (the others) than the musically immensely ambitious part of it (me). Nevertheless I continued the collaboration with Sande and Riikka for one more progressive rock album during which I already started to sense that maybe my times with progressive rock were about to be over. That is the subject of chapter VII.

Path of a Composer Chapter V: Polyblock – Strive or Warp

Welcome on a journey! I call it the Path of a Composer. The idea is to post key pieces of my music from along the years and hopefully put some light on how I have developed aesthetically, in my craftsmanship and of course also artistically — resulting in these days where I am finally ready to proudly launch myself as a composer of modern art music. It is time for Chapter V.

Polyblock: Strive or Warp (2010-2011, selection of three movements)

Chapter IV was the story of my first solo album. It was a thrill to feel independent as an artist and to be musically completely genuine, honest and free. I got such encouraging feedback on pathétique that there was no need to get timid. Pathétique was composed very quickly yet I knew I had not lived up to my full potential, not even close. I was in an artistically very ambitious stage.

Sometime around pathétique Discordia and I parted ways. Yet there were quite a few progressive rock songs yet to be recorded which I had composed for the band. I thought I had put too much effort in to trash them. So I started to plan my most ambitious work so far: Strive or Warp. I asked Riikka (from Discordia) and Henri (from pathétique) to cooperate with me on the album and they agreed. At the same time I had bought my first studio system with Protools and I started to teach myself how to record and program — in a way I also wanted to see how far I could technically go just by myself.

The trilogy of songs I chose and that were left over from Discordia were lyrically and musically science fiction. I knew from the beginning I would end the recording with the trilogy. Early on the structure of the music started to form in my head. There would be two parts: the first part would ask the question “Strive or Warp“, there would be a Warp in the end of the section — and the rest would happen in the science fiction universe I had created earlier. In the end there were seven movements. The first 4 movements were new material, the last 3 were the epic trilogy from Discordia.

It sounds like a cliche but I cannot (or will not) create music without being seriously inspired. So I always need to ask myself what is it that I would myself want to hear or express at the given time. So in addition to the Scifi Trilogy which was a given, I needed to find the inspired me here and now for this album. Well, this time I got seriously inspired by John Coltrane´s Stellar Regions which Henri once played me. The saxophone playing was down to fundamental principles, immensely serious and impactful. I was immediately very inspired indeed.

At the same time the image of Beethoven as a Janus Statue — facing both classicism and romanticism — resonated in me to such an extent that I thought about it quite often. I felt that I was facing rock & prog and at the same time facing the other world of serious art music. One of my faces also wanted to create music that people would be touched by and would understand (tonality based) — and at the same time I wanted to create music that would boldly explore the possibilities of expression through being honest primarily to myself (the boundaries of tonality would be bent and at places broken, if needed).

Thirdly, after the typical “suite structure” of pathétique, I definitely wanted to go symphonic this time. Being inspired by John Coltrane, wanting to express the Janus Statue Situation and striving to go symphonic eventually resulted in the opening movement of the work: Ianus Statue.

Ianus Statue is definitely my first take on symphonic music. After the introduction the two saxophones take the main role and talk with the two mouths of Janus. I perceive the movement as kind of sonata form: there is an introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation and coda. The music is not evolved around singable melodies. Ianus Statue is not a song in any way. It is not rock. Is it progressive rock? I am not sure about that either. If pressed, I would say that at least compositionally it is one third progressive rock, two thirds art music.

When it comes to my own compositions, Ianus Statue is amongst my favourites. I feel that in this piece I for the first time showed the elevated version of myself as a composer and musician. It was like having a look high up a mountain and deciding to climb up there. Henri´s saxophones are perfect in my opinion — this is what saxophones are all about to me, and it couldn´t have been any other instruments. Flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet — absolutely not. This is saxophone music. Also I am very proud of the vocal choir work by Riikka and myself in the recapitulation. This is symphonic and it is in G minor — the key of Mozart´s 40th. The key just always felt the right for this work.

I must say that due to my strong need for musical renewal with every recording I have created I have lost some of my previous listeners and gained new listeners — but Ianus Statue is one of the very few pieces by me that has so far been liked by basically everybody. So maybe like a true Janus it manages to look to both directions and find the balance between being approachable and seriously artistic!

Also: the other face is maybe striving, the other one is looking for some warping? I could go on forever with the dualisms, of course!

Stimmung is the 3rd movement. The name is kind of an homage to Karlheinz Stockhausen and his electronic music. I needed a movement that would without words express the dichotomy between modern hectic futility — and on the other hand the longing for peace of mind. I decided to achieve this in an experimental way by juxtaposing different musics against each other in the stereo picture. In the end there is only one “Peace of Mind music” and “3 Hectic Futilities”.

The Peace of Mind music is played on church organ with a lot of cathedral reverb. The Hectic Futilities are musics that have logic to them but they just go on and on without pausing or having any true contrasts anywhere. Some people might be aware of my dislike for “neoclassical, grotesque or ironic dance-like staccato hopping”. Well, if you have wondered what I mean by that, the Three Hectic Futilities of the Stimmung movement might help you understand!

In the end we needed to advance all the way up to The Warp. Phase Shift is the last movement before the other universe. This work is a combination of me wanting to provide space for Henri Haapakoski to improvise on his saxophone and also me wanting to fully express my hate and dislike for the constant STRIVING of modern human life. So I decided Henri would be directing the Phase Shift on top the tribal atmosphere created by me and drive the listener towards the Warp while I would express the awfulness of not warping…

Phase Shift is the craziest music I have created. It remains my most disliked piece of music! Then again composer Osmo Tapio Räihälä decided to play it on YLE (Finnish national broadcasting company) radio channel as an example of Finnish progressive rock. There are friends of Phase Shift, too. I am one of them, for various reasons.

First of all in Phase Shift I managed to let go of controlling all the music. For me that was something new. The piece is almost as much Henri´s as it is mine. His playing and improvisation and the textures he creates are absolutely gorgeous! Secondly, I could not have expressed in a more extreme way what I think about the bloody constant STRIVE of the modern society. The repetitive STRIVE chords were even painful to sing! It was very difficult to breathe in between the barking. I have never been as exhausted or as out of breath or in as deep disbelief after singing than I was after recording my vocals for this one. Riikka and I always laugh warmly after we have revisited this crazy piece of music!

I think the first half of Strive or Warp was musically successful. It was symphonic and people familiar with my later Symphony proper will hear that it is from the same person. Then again it is obvious that being new with the studio technics, I did bite more than I could chew. It resulted in that I was too exhausted to produce the scifi trilogy part properly. The sounds are plain and simple so bad that I cannot listen to them. The compositions are fine but the sounds are unbearable. A very complex 50 minutes album was a bit too much for my technical skills and longevity at the time. That is the reason why I have withdrawn Strive or Warp.

It is a bit peculiar that so far with every Chapter of this blog series I have presented you a different artist name. Shistavich, Waehnen, Discordia, fäänä, Polyblock. The reason for that is that I have never enjoyed the focus being on me as a person. I rather hide behind band names or acronyms and let the music speak. I also have a huge inner need for renewal. So I tend to reject the past and really go for the new. Like I said before, with every point of renewal I have lost some “fans” and gained new ones. Still it is the only way for me.

Sometimes it is hard for me to believe, but even Strive or Warp — where I was most ambitious musically inside progressive rock and went over the top — had some true friends. Some people still say that it is their favourite album from me. It felt immensely good that there were reviews where my hard work was being acknowledged. I have read reviews where the whole drama of the album has been understood without me explaining any of it. With the album technical weaknesses were more exposed than ever but still some people did not care but valued the musical ambition. People forgave my technical errors. That felt very good and it still does.

Creating Strive or Warp left me and my ears musically and most of all technically exhausted. I learnt the hard way that I cannot do it all by myself and that realistic limits must be set around the scope of the work in advance in order to maintain the constant quality. Inevitably I also started to value cooperation once again. The Chapter VI will tell how Riikka and I eventually returned to Discordia and how I got to compose my longest and greatest progressive rock song and record it with great musicians.