A WRAP, IT IS
I spent this week doing assorted odds and ends, plus working on the Bud Reichard record that I’ve been working on and off with for the last few months, as schedule permits. It was nice to see Bud again, he’s always cheerful, and he came loaded with many files of outside musicians to incorporate into his songs. We received a stunning string arrangement from Phil Petersen, who did some of the string arrangements for Soft Commands. I also did some mix adjustments for mixes I’d done for the Sad Knights from Toulouse, I’d done the mixes at the very end of the year, even on New Year’s Eve, and now with a little time and perspective I was not only able to accommodate some adjustments from the others but take a breather and rethink a few things and make even better sonic environments all around.
My MIDI woes were solved--a friend who is a local musician in Paris brought another friend who has a studio in town and he showed me some tricks for solving general computer woes, MIDI routing in ProTools, and we determined I had some ill software, and went back to an older version of this particular softsynth I had troubles with, and it’s been working fine ever since.
I woke up to snow on Monday, and this was great fun, having snowball fights on the way to school with Aden. It was all gone by Monday afternoon, obliterated by the rain; and the rain itself gave up and moved on, and we had crystalline blue skies for the remaining days of the week, beautiful sunrises occurring right as we set out for school each day.
On Friday I was on the evening flight to Oslo, maybe for the 20th or 30th time in my life. I never know how long it will take me to get to Orly--traffic jams, a sudden drought of taxis--but in fact it was an easy trip this time, and there were very few people in line when I checked in, so when our flight was delayed for an hour due to a mechanical problem, it meant I was in Orly Sud for like 3 hours total. I know every inch of Terminal B, where the flights on Norwegian and Easy Jet leave from. I know every item in every shop, etc. I was so relieved to get on the plane. Upon arrival in Oslo, I quickly claimed my bag, and hopped the airport express train. It stops in the Oslo suburb of Skøyen, which is the nearest stop to Claus Disciplines’ house. Unfortunately, there was a track maintenance issue, which meant the train had to travel much more slowly, so I encountered yet another delay. All in all it was like 8 hours of travel from door to door. But Claus was kind enough to wait up and pick me up at the train station.
LARVIK, 2/7
We spent the day getting ready for our video shoot on Sunday; picking up some clothes, getting a few supplies, picking up a rental van, all the details that needed to be covered. It was snowing quite hard, even by Norwegian standards, and we had to carefully pick our way to Larvik, normally a two hour drive but in this case it took about three. I drove in the van with Bjorn, and we occasionally fishtailed if the road was especially persnickety. But, soon we entered Larvik and pulled into the parking lot of the train station. There is a little station house there, with a waiting area, a Narvesen (pretty much a 7-11, Narvesen is everywhere in Norway) and a little cafe called Sporet. Sporet has been commandeered by the cool kids in town, and they do arty things there of all stripes. Its functionality is only coincidental to the passengers--they *do* serve coffee there, you *can* get food (actually, I think it wins as the best hamburgers I’ve found in Europe) but to cite other examples, it’s probably the only train station cafe in the world that has a prominently displayed completely inaccurate clock. You are expected to be here to hang, not because you are in a train station with no where to go. Sporet presumes to be a destination in itself. It’s quite tiny, strung with Christmas lights and has board games of every imaginable type. It reminds me in size and vibe of Prinz Willy in Kiel, but unf. without the delicious cakes. We loaded in, and set up risers along the back wall so more people could see.
We soundchecked, running the tiny PA ourselves. After this, Bjorn and I spent the evening backstage writing songs with Ariol, a young songwriter from Oslo, and came up with some really cool things. He’s a very nice young guy, a teenager, but professional and cool. This occupied us in a very productive and pleasant way til showtime. There was room for about 50 people in Sporet; we had 55, plus staff. I dressed in the blue custodial jumpsuit that was part of my wardrobe for the video. I think Baard said it had been his father’s...we opened this show tonite with a brand new, first time played live song, and did another brand new song in the encore. All in all, it was a great party for all the hometown friends of the band, plus we made a few hundred bucks to cover the costs of the video, *and* got to play new songs. And we played superbly well, and had tons of fun. I took at least half the audience out to the station hall to jump for ‘I Got Tired’...I crawled, spat toward, and generally molested the audience and all had a great time. There was one incredible guy, a big guy, pretty drunk, with glasses rimmed with flashing blue LEDs, singing along with every word, I was SO PISSED he didn’t come to the video shoot today, but I guess this night he was pretty drunk so he would have felt quite bad today. He was awesome tho. I played off him most of the night cuz he was so energetic. At one point he started to strip and he threw his clothes across the entire room to land in my open left hand while I sang...amazing. I just remembered that during the soundcheck there was a guy at the bar, super drunk, and really obnoxious, we all wanted him to go away, and it turns out he was still drunk from the night before...man, you can die of hypothermia being shitfaced in -7 weather like this...thankfully he went home before doors officially opened.
As I mentioned to my bandmates, after the show I, completely sober in respect of general health and the 9am call time for the video (I have been starving, exercising, and respecting sobriety--alcohol is yet another carb--for weeks now leading up to this shoot), observed amongst the good people of Larvik that the general fabric of society was rapidly rupturing at every seam...the mating rituals of this particular breed of Norwegian seem to run along these lines: find available, or willing, or unresisting mate; mate. It was getting heavy, so I got outta Dodge and got some beauty sleep.
LARVIK, 2/8
Up at 7, I was tired, and my eyes were a bit sore, but I generally benefited from the wisdom of the preceding evening’s choices. We assembled back at Sporet and loaded up the van and drove it to the G Gundrsen Larvik, AS factory. This is the family business of Claus’ oldest and closest friend, Gunder Gundersen (Dom & I spent New Year’s Eve 2007-2008 at the Gundersen’s house in Stavern, just down the road from Larvik). It’s a bakery for making crisp bread: you know, high fiber, whole grain unleavened (that is, flat) things. The business really operates somewhere else and the old factory, that looks to me to a 1960s relic, is going to be demolished at some point, but in fact a technical problem had caused operations to be moved back to the old location just the week before the video shoot was to be scheduled. But, essentially, the place exists as a time capsule--rotary phones, horrific eighties decor choices, and bulky old machinery. The freight elevator alone looked like something from the ‘Saw’ series of movies. I had seen pics of the location, and deemed it a good choice (the price was certainly right!) but I was pleasantly surprised when we eventually entered (haha, Gunder was a little late, having had about as much fun as anyone could have at our Sporet show, and *he* was the promoter!). Before entering, we stood out in the snow, the day was clear and sunny, and we being that factory is on the edge of Larvik’s industrial harbor, we gazed out into the water, which was sheeted with ice. Swans, gulls and ducks rested on the ice or swam in the open channels. So, on the right half of the panorama there was this natural scene, looking across a bay to the other side, which was forested and tranquil. The left hand side was purely industrial--loading cranes, smokestacks, grain elevators. An enormous ferry arrived from Denmark and unleashed a flurry of activity on the wharf, most of which involved pushing snow out of the way to actual work could get done.
We went in, and started hauling stuff up the two flights of stairs to the factory floor--the freight elevator was inaccessible as the loading area required a key we didn’t have. The film crew had their gear, and we had backline, risers (which are quite awkward and heavy) and a PA. I set up camp in a small office on the 1st floor (or, to you Americans who don’t understand that 1 comes after zero, the 2nd floor). Here I could change and iron clothes, and at least close a door in hopes the tiny electric wall heater would actually be able to contribute something against the ambient cold.
The factory floor wash awash in sunlight from two sides, and this made an interesting contrast with the kind decayed industrial look of the machinery and walls. Since it had just been in use, there were stacks of cooling racks with flatbread, pallets holding 20-pound bags of flour, etc. Oddly, the place smelled like pigeons, even tho there were none to be seen. It was the yeasty, dusty smell of the dust of forty years or more of flour and baked whole grain bread haunting the scene.
Some of the machinery had a monitoring catwalk running alongside it so this made a nice place to put Baard and Bjorn and their amps--Claus and his drums were in front of that on a riser that itself sat on pallets, so he was a little higher than me, standing on a riser with my mic stand. The setting, the light, the amazing RED camera that the shooting was done on, all worked together magically, and the song (Yours For the Taking) provided energy enough to make every take exhausting but visually very exciting.
We did takes with and without the audience of extras, and let me say, the extras that did come were incredible. I think only one or two came from Sporet--it was noticeable that the people willing to show up on a Sunday afternoon to jump around in a video were mostly below drinking age! And they rocked, really providing a punky edge to things. It was like having the Powerpuff Girls as an audience, singing along.
By 5 in the afternoon, the sun was fading fast, and we tore down and loaded out, and celebrated with a wrap dinner at Sporet. I had a glass of wine and enjoyed not worrying about my figure for a bit. On the way out of the building, I was struck by the incredible blue of the not-yet-dark-but-no-longer-light sky and its reflection on the harbor, cut by the pacing swans. A nearly full moon emerged and in comparison the sky at last seemed black.
One curious little scene at the factory when we arrived: between the factory and the harbor, just before the land drops down towards what is apparently a white sand beach, but is obscured by 3 feet of snow at present, there is a little caravan trailer. When we arrived, a man emerged, and with no interest in our presence, started to photograph the morning scenery of the harbor on a small digital camera, then went back in. At this time, Gunder was late and we were out in the cold, and I wondered if he was a kind of watchman. Turns out that the caravan is the meeting place for a society of very tidy alcoholics, who meet there every day to drink. Rather than chase them out, the elder Mr. Gundersen, in an impish tweak to the conservatism of Larvik, simply ran them out a power line. Thus, the local winos gather here in peace and in fact practice a kind of ownership off the area, cleaning trash off the beach and shooing off would be thieves. So, I wasn’t totally wrong, but the agreement to watch the area is unspoken and simply developed as gratitude for Mr. G’s generosity.
At last, after driving the two hours back to Oslo, unloading the gear and dropping the van, the project was a wrap--before post of course. I pretty much crawled into bed as soon as I got to Claus’ house, but saw an email already from Petter, our co-director/DP, with links to some little snippets of raw footage, and these 5 second bits already look amazing. And, much will grow in the Post/FX work over the next week and half. Look for it around the end of the month! You’ll be hearing about it here!
Love
KS
Oslo
