Älymystö Album Release Tour & Iron Sky Goes Germany

January 22, 2010 · Posted in Band Projects

I’m currently at home, reeling from the shock of the shock caused by my surroundings. In the last month I’ve spent about five days at home, the rest of the time being eaten by our diving trip to Hurghada, which I wrote about in the previous blog post, followed by Älymystö’s album publication tour and after that a week and a half in Germany with the Iron Sky crew.

The few days after we got back to home from Hurghada were full of activity. Started my new work week by fixing my brand new Macbook Pro to a working condition, and promptly getting a mild stomach flu on my first work day. My upset stomach kept me at home for the beginning of the week and slowed me up enough that I couldn’t get all the work preparation done before it was time to leave for the Älymystö tour.

As I’ve written earlier, Älymystö published its first release since Atomgrad and we went out to Tampere, Helsinki, Tallinn and Riga to promote it on a tour. In Finland the weather has been really wintery and blizzardy, bad enough to get trams stuck in the snow and ice in Helsinki downtown. Considering that our trip had surprisingly few mishaps in the Finnish end, and even driving around the Baltics was easy. The tour was incredibly satisfying: we had fun gigs, playing was fun and went well, we managed to stream live video from some of them to the net and we got to visit the coolest fucking underground club we had ever seen, Elektra in Riga. You can read more about our trip in Älymystö’s blog!

The only bad thing was that we got back home around midnight on Sunday, and Timo and I had to get up at four to catch our plane to Berlin for the Iron Sky trip. I had slept for three and a half hours in the previous night and spent the day driving us from Riga to Tallinn. When the alarm clock went off after another 3,5 hour night, I was sure I’d fucking die right then, right there.

So, my new job as the publicist and making of -producer of Iron Sky started off with a bang. On Monday we went straight into business, me with a new camera I hadn’t even touched before I got it in Germany. What followed was a week and a half of movie business, including everything from going through moods and set plans through checking out potential shooting locations and ending with casting new actors. I can honestly say that it was probably the most fun ten days I’ve spent so far while working from nine in the morning to nine or ten in the evening. The days just flew past, the couple of free nights we spent out were fun and the whole deal filled me up with enthusiasm about the work. Intrigued? Read more info from Iron Sky’s production blog!

On the hobby front Susi and I also started an intensive course in Arabic and the first lessons were today. So, yet another language with non-latin letters, and a rather difficult language at that. We started our studies with book Arabic, which is kind of useless if you want to use the language in a spoken setting. Then again, it gives your a good basis on learning one of the spoken dialects. Maybe in the future we’ll be having trips to Egypt which are composed half and half of diving and intensive language study.

In any case, check out the Älymystö and Iron Sky blogs for both blog posts and pretty pics. For me it’s time to hit the bed so I’ll have the energy to go through over five hours of video from Germany and a couple of hours of footage from Älymystö tour – so yes, there will be video too.