Bajo Cero band's blog

About a year ago our usually loud orchestra went pretty speechless, as a huge crowd of Finns voted for the party that in foreign magazines gets translated as ”the True Finns”. For sure a big part of the voters just wanted some changes to many real problems, but for many others their choice looked like growing intolerance or even allowance of racism in the public debate. For us damn hippies that support softer values, that triumph of hard values or a closed Finland came as a total surprise. For that I blame Facebook.

When you get to choose your friends and acquaintances, the mass of people whose opinions you see and hear from day to day, it’s easy to keep the illusion that the whole world thinks just the way you do. This issue has been recently approached quite critically by internet activist Eli Pariser in her book Filter Bubble.

Luckily it still seems that quite a bunch of people think pretty much the same way we do. At this moment we have the second round of the presidential election in Finland, and tolerance, humanity and human rights appear to be possibly the biggest themes. After the so called True Finn spring, who would’ve thought that on the second round of these elections the other candidate would be an openly gay man with modern green values.

Many of our friends have surprised us by not just commenting or spamming on Facebook, but by actually taking actions. In our cold distant hometown people organized a support concert for the candidate Haavisto, as he is known to have not quite as much money for campaigning as his competitor that is supported by Big Money. Many brilliant local musicians offered their help in the best way they could, by playing music and having a good time.

That same bright and shiny but terribly cold winter day Bajo Cero was (although we were with those musicians in spirit) in a pretty different kind of a place, crossing borders in our own way. Check the brand new video blog to find out!

-Anna

• share:
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share via MySpace
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend

Making music makes you look very silent.

You know writers that end up writing about writing? Or about not writing, or about just trying to write. Well, it’s hard to make a song about making a song. Some people I can say have succeeded in it, but not many. I don’t want to give it a try. I’d rather stick to something else. Not drumming about trying to do percussion.

Get to the point: We’ve been silent as hell, as we’ve been working our behinds off. The more you work on music, the more silent it seems to get. When you work it’s hard to keep on shouting about it.

Silence is good for our guitar hero Okko, as all the recordings are now over, and he’s concentrating on mixing and mastering the stuff the others played. He will soon be turning into wobbling pink mold in the corner of his house, as the solitude and too much mixing start to work on him.

But we have a solution: Releasing a record this spring requires other stuff, not just the music. So we’re taking Okko out of his house today, to go and see a few places for our promotional pictures, and some animals. It’s good to see animals every now and then, in between mixing and mastering. You’ll be getting a few glimpses of this process in a few days if we’re not eaten by those animals.

We’re also in the process of making a music video. Maybe several. But let’s start with one. To be honest I’d like to direct one myself. I have the right car for the great getaway scene (my friend’s old yellow car), and that’s about all I have. A Great start! Next I will need a camera.

-kili

• share:
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share via MySpace
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend

I went to Mexico to my brother´s wedding and it was such an interesting trip. Now I really have a Mexican family there. On my trip I was thinking the differences between social cultures in Finland and Mexico. Like in Spain, in Mexico, the family is really an important thing and when you speak about the family you mean all your grandparents, aunts, cousins and so on. And they meet each other very often and have parties together. During the two weeks the relatives and friends often got together having a good time eating, talking and playing. In Finland the family is important too, but we don’t gather all the relatives together so often, only when we have a very good reason for that, like wedding or funeral.

Then I noticed that maybe we don´t have so big families here in Finland, but we have other groups that can be as close as family. Bajo Cero is one for me – like a family. We are really close to each other and share all the good things and bad things together. And we have also parties! A common goal in life can bring people together. Like in Family there are different personalities for our band, but that´s also the richness for our band. I´m happy about all my families in Finland and Mexico and I think the best thing people can have is to get such wonderful dear people near you. And I think I’ve got the best!

-Elina

• share:
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share via MySpace
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend

Facebook keeps pissing people off by changing every now and then. Small changes that make things just a bit slower because you can’t find the right button, or bigger timeline changes that might reveal some silliness you burped out years ago. Why do they keep doing this, ARRRH?!

A friend of mine had solved this: the company has lots of employees that they need every now and then, but not all of the time. And the unwritten law of employees is you need to look busy even when there’s no rush, otherwise you’ll be the first to get the sack. So the employees keep fixing these changes just to show their bosses they’re doing something.

Nice theory, but I think most companies wouldn’t have a crowd of people just moving the Log Out button around once a month.

As Facebook users, we tend to think of ourselves as active individuals, rather than as a faceless mass (pun intended). But we forget the basic fact of marketing, the fact that if you’re not paying for it, you are the product. A company called Facebook is selling marketing space for other companies, and the actual product they sell is the huge mass of audience.

So making major changes like the timeline during holiday seasons is not a bad idea. It just means people spend more time in Facebook, and that means they (at least in a passive way) spend more time next to the adverts on the side bar.

For bands like ours it is still the inevitable truth, that communities like Facebook are the easiest way to keep in touch with those who want to hear us and of us. It is for example the easiest way to link this blog to hundreds of people.

Still, I think my friend Raffaello caught an important point that he shared, ha ha, of course in his Facebook status. I will finish by translating it (which is pretty funny, as he is Italian but wrote it in Finnish. But our band that sings in Spanish has a blog in English…)

“This facebook isn’t quite working anymore. It’s complicated and utterly boring. Friends, acquaintances, close friends, create a new group, filters, restricted, don’t show, show, like, oh no, don’t like. It was maybe fun years ago to find old school mates in here, but after a few messages all that is left is pictures and updates that you actually don’t know anything about. Family, kids, wives, engaged, husbands, is in a relationship, is no longer in a relationship, likes, does not like. Maybe the past being past still has a meaning: the things that go there are such things that simply have gone, to the past. And you don’t have to pick them back up with timeline. They already went.”

-kili

• share:
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share via MySpace
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend

Browsing through our last year’s bolg brought back all the highlights of the year and all the things we need to be grateful of, now that the year is coming to an end.

We had an awesome summer, filled with gigs and festivals, each one very different from the other. From Kuopio dance festival to Haapavesi folk festival to Pori Jazz to a Tampere flamenco festival and then to Oulu’s biggest rock festival Qstock. Now tell me, what other bands have such a wide variety of places to perform at? And that wasn’t all folks. We are truly glad to have had such a warm welcome at each place we went to. This litte article was published after Qstock festival at a musician’s web-portal called meteli.net. They wrote something nice about us too.

Last year we had also done some serious songwriting as we worked on most of the songs that are now in our repertoire. The same songs, including some brand new ones will ofcourse appear on our album next spring.

Last autumn will surely be remembered as the “recordings autumn”. Each one of ous had our turn at the Hietasaari studio, built by our own recorning and producing genious Okko. Since then he has been working hard to get our upcoming album to sound as good as it can – to sound like us. For that we are also grateful. Thanks Okko! <3

We have also been granted some financial support for the publishing of the record from various directions – yet another thing to be thankful of. It really is important to know your music is considered to be worth the support, especially when you decide to push through with your own decisive ambitions and want to be independent.

There’s still alot of work ahead. That’s why now it’s time to take a moment and enjoy the silence, candle light and rest. Next year will be even better and busier.

Anna

• share:
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share via MySpace
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend

Digital is for noobs! I love the sound of ancient analog gear and we have used it during our record making as much as possible. That can take you to unforeseen places.

Good gear costs a fortune so I build my stuff myself. Anyway, you can’t buy the parts needed from local hardware store. You have to hunt them down from weird places around the world. There is a small number of obsessed freaks like me scattered around the globe who feel passionately about music and electronics and can help you in the process.

So when you hear a sound on our upcoming album here is the story of its path from the recording room to your sound system:

First there is the instrument (for example: Guitar, made in 2001, Hietasaari, Finland ):

Then that sound goes to year 2010 and to a small one-man shop in Denmark that makes über-quality microphone transducers.

Next it travels in time to a mega facility in USA 1972 that made the amplifier tube inside the mic.

Destination no. 3 is a factory in USSR 1967 that produced high grade paper-and-oil-type capacitors out of PCB and other nasty stuff for the soviet aerospace.

To cut the long story short here’s the rest:

Sweden, 2004, Mic transformer >

Germany, 2009, Mic chord >

UK, 1974, Preamp transformers >

USA, 1956, Compressor transformers >

China 2010, Audio level meter >

Australia, 2011, Compressor circuit board >

And in between there are hundreds of other small parts made in countless eras and cities.

Through the years, these parts have travelled the places and finally found their way to my little studio. Some of this stuff has been used thousands of times before, to record countless songs, who knows where and when. Audio electronics is a big part of the history of the art of music. The hunt for the most compelling sounds ties the world together in curious and inspiring ways.

-Okko

• share:
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share via MySpace
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend

This august I got a real dream job, working as a producer at JoJo – Oulu dance center. JoJo is a production house that organizes dance productions and events throughout the year. It has been really interesting both professionally and socially as new winds have been blowing and I’ve learnt alot and met some really interesting people. The best thing about my job is that I get to see all kinds of dance pieces and performances, mostly contemporary dance.

Since my main channel to dance and performing live music has earlier been flamenco, I tend to take the same approach to these two even when watching a piece that completely differs from flamenco.

It is somewhat written in the whole consept of flamenco that it is always packed with so much feeling, gathering tension and then letting it burst, something that can be quite over the top or even pompous. Flamenco pieces (or if you cut it into smaller bits, even a single dance or a song) have the same structure as any good Disney movie. There’s the serene beginning, after which a turning point or a problem that needs solving and then it all builds up to a big explosive ending scene during which everyone cries or laughs or preferably both. There are archetypes aswell as the three basic feelings: happiness, sadness and hate. In flamenco, there is not so much space for things in between. No grey zone. It’s all traditionally red and black.

When I started seeing more contemporary dance pieces I felt that something was missing. There was alot of movement but no climaxes. Where was the loud, breathtaking fury? Where was the feeling, the beginning, the middle and the end? After a while I started suspecting my own agenda as a member of the audience. Did I just want to experience the same safe and familiar thing all over again?

Just the other day when I was having lunch, it hit me. Flamenco is a little bit like chili. When you start seasoning your food with it, you will want more and more and in the end it will turn your tastebuds numb so that you can’t taste any more of those subtle flavours and nuances.

This year has opened my eyes (and maybe tastebuds) alot. Even though I still love and live flamenco, I’ve seen that there’s more you can do and experience. Maybe if at first some things don’t seem to open up to you, it might be that it’s you who needs to be more open and not the thing. The same goes with life, work, music, dance and art. I’ll try to keep my eyes more open next year and maybe I’ll find more colours than red and black.

Anna

• share:
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share via MySpace
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend

I had a look at the official music charts in Finland, you know, the record sales ones, where they tell you how many CD’s have been sold. Or whatever it is they’re selling nowadays, it seems I’ve lost the track of that, but some items are being sold and then listed, top to bottom.

For a moment I felt proud to be a Finn, as this week it seems that 16 out of the 20 first places were taken by Finnish records. OK, there wasn’t a single album there that I’d buy, but still – at least this crap wasn’t exported from far away, and we’re self-sufficient crapwise. Hooray!

I had to admit that this great feeling in the beginning was just a glimpse of a prehistoric man inside me, hooraying for “us”, for the victory over “them”. As I analyzed my feelings for about five seconds, I caught that old phrase by Marx in my mind and realized that what goes with capital goes with crap too: it has no nationality. Who cares where it comes from, if it is what it is.

But I did feel happy for a second.

And I still feel that we should be proud of our Finnish music. Every now and again there are records in the Finnish Top 20 that appear just out of the blue, and gain major success for music that, according to the music manuals, should have never been there. No-good-stuff, and never-gonna-make-it-people that have gone there and stayed there for decades sounding good. Material too hard to cathegorize and way too beyond to be corrupted.

And what more, it seems that (although this week the charts would not be boasting with artists that flatter my artsy sense) the long lasting great names in Finnish music quite often sneak in from the marginal and tend to drag their own marginal to the spotlight. They might get popular, i.e. people like them, but categorizing them as “pop” would be out of the question.

Take, for example, M.A.Numminen who should have never started singing (what he calls jazz). Or Sielun Veljet, who made thousands of people go wild with their organic rave music years before “rave”, and before “organic” was something people would be ready to pay for. Or PMMP,that is the top of Finnish charts every time they publish an album that does never fit the concept of a pop album.

Having this background it is quite obvious that we do what we do with Bajo Cero. Of course it is polyrhythmic flamenco-based world music in Spanish in a country where nobody speaks Spanish. A total sell-out! This is so predictable!

-kili

• share:
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share via MySpace
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend

Last week I had my autumn holiday and time to enjoy many really exciting art experiences. First I went to see the 3D-dance movie “Pina”, which was really impressive. The movie was dedicated to a  German choreographer Pina Bausch who died at the age of seventy. She had a huge influence on the dancers she’d been conducting. The dancers (old and young) danced their own solos to Pina´s memory and told some stories about her. Pina had really found their strength as dancers. Choreographies were performed in different environments; for example in a forest, on the edge of a ravine or in a traffic circle. There were also some choreographies from Pina, for example Spring victim, which was wild. Pina used a lot of basic elements in her work, like water and earth. I haven’t seen many 3D movies before, but in this case it really worked out and made it an integrated experience. Music in the movie was great too. I can recommend this movie.

Last week there was also a contemporary flamenco festival “Flamingo” in Helsinki. First I went to see a flamenco movie “Poligono sur”, which told about gypsies in Sevilla, who lived in an area where even taxis don’t drive. The movie was directed by a French director, Dominique Abel, who was also present. She told that it wasn’t easy to go there and make this movie, but still it was really an interesting experience. These gypsies had been living in the famous part of Sevilla, Triana, and after they had been sent out to Poligono sur where they lived in the centre of concrete. There were a lot of problems there, for example drugs used by youngsters, many of them already dead. Still people living there where playing flamenco everywhere, and life was really communal. They decided to organize a concert in the suburb and show all the people what kind of art they make there and to wake up the authorities. This movie was made already in 2003, but still this topic is really current. In Finland we have a lot of the same kind of thinking too, when immigrants are forced to live all in the same area and problems pack in.

I saw also nice dance performances in this festival. The final was Night of the Solos, performed by famous Spanish and Mexican flamenco dancers, and one by the Finnish, beautiful Kaari Martin. I was really amazed by a Mexican dancer Karen Lugo whom I haven´t seen before. She performed her choreography called CAMINOTODOLOCURAEL… which means something like the lunacy from start to finish. She was a dancer with a great pure technique and strong expression. She also used some video projections in her choreography which made her work even better. After all, I had a nice few days´ holiday with these art experiences I wanted to share with you.

-Elina

• share:
• Recommend on Facebook
• Share via MySpace
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend