Dear friends, we have reached the fourth installment of our coverage regarding the upcoming Czech edition of the official biography of the Suomi metal icon Amorphis by the writer, journalist and musician Markus Laakso. Today we are following up on last week's contents presentation with an excerpt! 

Specifically, the sample in question comes from chapter seven, which deals with the creation of "The Karelian Isthmus", the now legendary Amorphis debut full-length, in the Sunlight Studio in Sweden. 

As usual, the whole excerpt is presented as it will appear in the Czech translation when printed, with layout and typesetting by Radek Doleží. Click on individual images to enlarge. The English text can be found further below. 

The English original text is as follows:

The Karelian Isthmus sessions

Amorphis had perfect timing. European record labels such as Nuclear Blast and Earache were signing death metal bands at an increasing pace, and the popularity of the genre also continued to grow in the United States. Many Americans began taking influence from European bands, especially from Sweden. There still weren’t too many death metal bands in Finland, but Relapse could smell the potential of Amorphis. Perhaps that’s why the record company agreed with the band’s suggestion that their debut album The Karelian Isthmus (1992) would be recorded at Tomas Skogsberg’s Sunlight Studios, where several of the genre’s classics, such as Into the Grave (1991) by Grave, Darkthrone’s Soulside Journey (1991), Like an Everflowing Stream (1991) by Dismember, and the first two Entombed albums had been recorded. The Amorphis members were thrilled because, in their world, only two death metal dream studios existed: Morrisound in Florida, and Sunlight in Stockholm.

“We were in fucking high spirits and feeling great when a US label offered us a chance to record at Sunlight,” Rechberger reminisces with feeling. “We were digging Entombed and other Swedish bands whose albums had been made there. We celebrated it of course and immediately got drunk.”

According to Koivusaari everyone was also excited that at least for once in their lives the band could record one full vinyl album of their own music. The musicians travelled to Stockholm on a Viking Line cruise ship where the atmosphere was just as wild as one might imagine. Journalist Nalle Österman, who liked Skogsberg’s productions, had decided to travel with the band. He also tried to book a gig for the band in Sweden while they were recording, but with no success.

“Some other people from Finland showed up too,” Koivusaari says. “Random cruise travelers who spent one night there, for instance Kasper Mĺrtenson. They always brought us a copy of the tabloid Iltalehti.”

The players expected the world famous Sunlight to be a large complex with giant mixing tables and expensive equipment. In truth it wasn’t much larger or finer than the TTT studio of Tolkki. Rechberger recalls that Skogsberg had a mixer at his disposal that was somewhat larger than Tolkki’s, a 24-track reel-to-reel recorder, and a selection of compressors, equalizers, and processors. The recording studio, located in the basement of a high-rise building, consisted of one small live room and a control room, with a pile of keyboards in one corner. The social facilities were more spacious, with a kitchen, a bar counter, and a KISS pinball machine. The place was no pigsty however, it was quite clean. One could have almost lived there.

“In today’s standards, Sunlight was a demo studio, really nothing special,” comments Holopainen. “An old, somewhat deadpan punk oddball greeted us there. He seemed like he had probably smoked pot his entire life. Relaxed and nice. Analyzing things in retrospect, Skogsberg had been in the right place at the right time. His own sound developer into a pivotal scene sound, thanks to Dismember and Entombed. That became its own era: Skogsberg put his ‘made in Sweden’ stamp on the creations of his own time. We obviously went there to get the Swedish sound, and Skogsberg knew how to create that really well.”

Skogsberg was chain-smoking Yellow Blend. His ashtray rested solidly on top of the mixer, his lighter between the cigarette pack and its plastic covering. Because the entire band were also smokers, a grey cloud was constantly floating in the black-walled studio. Two weeks had been booked for Amorphis to record and mix things; they only needed one and a half. Originally the band was supposed to bunk at the studio, but Skogsberg wasn’t okay with that in the end.

“We spent one night at the studio,” laughs Koivusaari. “Obviously we boozed there and put Skogsberg’s archives in disarray. In the morning we realized that the shower had ice-cold water only, and the place was annoying in other ways too. We successfully begged Relapse for some money to rent a cabin, which the company then arranged directly. We sent Relapse a fax that said ‘Please, send us money, we are starwing’. Snoopy wrote the word starving with a w, claiming we were star-winged.”

The record company sent all budgeted money directly to Skogsberg. Some of it was intended to cover the band’s living costs. The producer rationed the expenses, which gave rise to some speculation among the players whether some of their money was kept from them. A cabin was rented for the group in the Klubbensborg camping area located at a lakeside not far away from Stockholm. The cabin had bunk beds, a fireplace, and a small kitchen where they could cook. They spent their days at the studio and their evenings in the cottage drinking Mellanöl – beer that had a lower alcohol content – because no one was old enough to buy anything stronger. Sometimes they tried to find like-minded people in the neighborhood of their dwellings, but longhaired metal enthusiasts were hard to come by in a natural environment favored by tourists.

“How do you spend time with such a group at a cabin?” Koivusaarigrins. “I don’t think any one of us had ever spent a few weeks on their own before. It was an adventure. We had a huge mountain of Mellanöl. When we left the cabin after the session in a terrible hurry, the place was supposedly so dirty that the geezer who ran the place demanded we pay several hundred Swedish kronor extra. We answered him ‘Come on, there are so many empty Mellanöl cans that they will cover your requirements – just collect them!’”

Snoopy reminisces that every night the guys would down about twenty cans each of this beer that was milder than what they had been used to. They put the empty cans in the firebox of the fireplace. When the recording sessions were over, only the sides of the fireplace were visible.

“It was frustrating that you had to drink so damn much of Mellanöl,” says Snoopy. “You had to pee all the time, and even after several dozen cans you were still all right, barely even drunk. In a sense it was a good thing that we could only get our hands on the milder beer, because it meant that the next day, we were in shape to play.”

Because all their scant money was spent on the mild beer, the players travelled their 45-minute metro journeys to the studio as fare-dodgers. Having to keep an eye out for ticket sellers and ticket inspectors, as well as occasionally having to bolt to escape, caused some additional stress. However the guys got excited upon hearing that the record company agreed to pay all the expenses of the recording session, accommodation, and boat trips. The band had no expectations about rockstardom or making any money anyway. Yet there was a feeling that something amazing was about to happen.

Snoopy hadn’t bothered to bring his own kit to the studio; instead he had only four pairs of drumsticks with him, two of which were triangular. The music store had run out of regular drumsticks so he ended up playing a few songs using the angular sticks. The greatest shock however was caused by the fact that Skogsberg had an electronic drumkit at his disposal, owned by Entombed drummer Andersson.

“That was pretty exciting,” Snoopy says. “Some rumors had been circulating about electronic drums being used on Entombed albums. I asked Skogsberg where the drum set was. ‘There.’ They were old Ddrums that had an L-shaped metal pole with triggers – like a bass drum, fucking heavy. When you attach the pedal to the pole, it won’t move an inch. There were two of them, and each one had its own pedal. The snare and cymbals were the real McCoy, but the bass and tom drums were electric Ddrum pads. The sounds came from some sort of a module. To this day, I still don’t know why the fuck he had ended up with a solution like that. I guess it’s easier to make the bass drum and such audible, and there won’t be any leakage into the mics. You can play really well on today’s electronic drum kits, if you just have the guts to do it, but the Skogsberg set sounded quite tolerable.”

Skogsberg says he used the borrowed electronic drum kit simply because he couldn’t afford to buy a proper acoustic kit for his studio. The reason was an economic one rather than having anything to do with actual recording.

“Skogsberg said he had recorded all his other albums with that kit,” continues Snoopy. “If the kings of the Swedish genre had been okay with that, I was okay with that. It was really weird to be suddenly playing a set like that. It had a completely different touch to it. It caused some hilarity, of course. Back then we used to laugh at everything. The others would just chuckle like ‘fuck, dude has a set like that!’. No problemo, we recorded the songs and that was it.”

In Oppu’s opinion the electronic drum kit served the purpose and the solution worked really well, even when Snoopy didn’t have much experience with playing acoustic drums either. After all, the man had earlier been the vocalist/guitarist and had begun his career as a drummer in earnest only a few years previously when Amorphis was founded.

“I’m not sure if I should reveal this,” says Oppu, “but the snares for the blast beat were separately tapped in with a drum machine by hitting its pad on a finger. There was a reason for it. It was related to an issue with the mixing technique, which wasn’t due to Snoopy not being able to play them, but because the triggers of the electronic drums didn’t receive quiet hits loudly enough, due to some velocity hassle between the module and the triggers. That’s why it was necessary to do it this way,” he clarifies.

The musicians made a deal not to speak a word about all this, because using an electronic drum kit would have put the band in a negative light, even though all the other bands that recorded at Sunlight had used the same drums. Another curious detail was left on the album in terms of the bass tracks. After Oppu had recorded his parts and they were about to start recording the guitars, the group noticed to their horror that the bass was in a slightly different tuning than what it was supposed to be.

“The studio had a rudimentary, shitty guitar tuner that we used to tune the instruments,” Koivusaari reveals. “When we noticed that the bass had a wrong tuning, Skogsberg, out of laziness, tried saying ‘aahh, I think it’s more like a Black Sabbath thing’. We answered him ‘come on, you know that the tuning is less than midway in the wrong direction’. Even Autotune would have tuned it to the wrong tuning. This ain’t no Black Sabbath, what are we going to do now? We then tried slowing the tape down minimally so that the bass sounded like it was in tune.”

Skogsberg didn’t get involved with the songs or their arrangements at all, even though he was listed as the album’s producer. He rather acted as a recording engineer who every now and then suggested how to play or work on a certain part. Even on their debut album, the band was producing their own music.

Enjoy and more next time!