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20.01.2009: 4711 Eau de Cologne

4711 Eau de Cologne

The wheels of Rajaton are rolling again!

We started this year by travelling to Cologne. This was our the first ever visit there, and hopefully there will be many more. The cathedral is stunning, and we saw the legendary fragrance advertisement at the railway station, but what truly impressed us was the wonderful crowd in our concert! Despite the radio broadcast they were delightfully loud and supportive for us and the co-act, pop choir Vocal Journey. Jawohl!!

Last week we finally celebrated the end of our successful Christmas tour. Yes, I know, our final concert in Seoul was on the 21st of December, but at that time we were wise enough to start our Christmas holidays immediately and delay the party until January. Now we were aflame again with the reminiscences of our joyful tour – what an amusing night!

We've had a nice and easy start for this year because after Cologne we've been working only in Helsinki. Instead of touring, we've concentrated on writing new songs with a new method: we divided into pairs to come up with song ideas. For me it's been really inspiring to work this way and it has encouraged me to try and write music of my own.

My first partner, Jussi, exposed his methods of composing with the piano and a computer. We created one obvious hit chorus ;-) and some chords for the verse. With my second partner, Ahti, I approached composing from another perspective: we sang all our ideas straight to the software. The outcome of the fun and productive session was again a great chorus, chords for the verse and a plenty of usable ideas. We'll see if some of them end up on our next CD... The most liberating thing for me has been to realize that composing isn't such a serious thing, on the contrary!

Now we'll keep on working at the studio. We entered the secrets of studio technology – guided of course by our sound wizard Ilu – to be more independent in experimenting these brand new song ideas by recording the best ones just by the six of us.

Oh, and this week we'll make our long-term dream come true and meet off-duty with our favourite Swedish colleagues! The agenda includes singing, conversation entitled "how we could develop our collaboration" and hopefully enough time to just chat and enjoy the good company. What a luxury!!

So, we're having quite a cheery start for the new year. I just came home from ice-swimming in a euphoric mood, and feeling tremendously grateful to be able to work like this, get wonderful experiences, and learn interesting new things about life and oneself. And of course to share these things with my precious family and friends.

But could we have some more snow in Helsinki, please? :-)

Virpi