The vinyl, or should I say vinyls.

Sadly, they had been abused by the postal service.

Inside the gatefold case was a poster.

A toetag with some information on, including my name missing the J in Hjort.

The toetag is on the totebag which holds…

… the evidence bag, which has…

… the t-shirt in it.

And when you unfold the t-shirt you find the stickers and pins.

For the first session I used a pair of really old PC speakers to hear what I was playing, but I wasn’t too happy with the result. On the second session, which was recorded yesterday, I used my earbuds. The downside of that was that I needed to keep the volume pretty low on both the digital recorder and the Monotron, in order to not damage my ears.

I’ll probably experiment more in getting the perfect volume, both for recording and playing. But in the meantime, listen to, and download, May 2nd and May 8th on SoundCloud.

I’ll most likely end up uploading “old” sessions to some cyberlocker, or even Archive.org, in the future since SoundCloud only allows 2 hours worth of sounds unless you pay.

Thanks to the alcohol I wasn’t nervous, or too impulsive. It was a real nice gig, though I wanted a bigger crowd.

And speaking of Reversed Obesity, I’ve previously mentioned that half of Definition was recorded while I was drunk. For better or worse, I don’t know. What I do know is that pretty much anything goes when alcohol and music making meets.

I remember one day in June of 2009, I had been out drinking with some friends and had gotten home around three in the morning. That year I was working on Year Of The Deer, and at the time I felt that the June track was missing something.

Why not add some drums to it, my intoxicated mind asked me. And that’s what I did as the alcohol was gradually wearing off and making me tired. I think it took me about an hour and a half to properly get those drums into the track, then I went to bed.

I woke up several hours later and had apparently forgotten to shut off the computer. It made me remember the changes I had made to the track. Luckily, it actually sounded good and it fit the rather eclectic track.

Other times I’ve poured myself a nice whiskey and made music, and it has sort of helped the sound I was going for, but then I wasn’t even close to being drunk or even slightly buzzed.

I don’t need to drink to get inspired, it only tends to garble what I’m trying to do. And as for playing live, I think I’ll stick to doing it sober. When I need to be in control, it’s just stupid to drink something that makes you lose control.

That said though, there’s nothing wrong with drinking a beer and listening to your own music.

Click image for full-size.

And that very day I found something special, namely Geld‘s first and only demo; Livshatförgöraren. I had no clue what it would sound like, but I figured I would like it, so I bought it.

I started listening to the demo when I got home, and I really wasn’t disappointed. They were good. Damn good. I remember thinking it sounded like slow electronic punk, and that is probably still the best way to describe it. It’s probably worth mentioning that I was listening a lot to EBM and electronic music at the time.

I friended Geld on MySpace (insert clever “Dude, remember MySpace?” joke here) and told them that I really enjoyed the demo. After a while I got a reply where they said thanks and asked me if I wanted to remix their tracks. Of course I did. Even considering saying no had been a stupid idea.

So they sent me a CDR with the stems of each track, except the vocals for one track caused it had apparently gotten lost. Even so, I was looking forward to it.

At the time I had gone from using Sony Acid to FL Studio, but I didn’t feel that FL would be the ideal environment for that specific project as I was still trying to get into it. Thus, it was back to Acid.

I loaded each stem for the first track and started cutting and re-arranging everything. Big chunks of guitars were discarded, and a three-second loop was used through-out the entire track.

And that was pretty much what I did; cutting, reversing and re-arranging everything. No fancy magic, no cheap or expensive effects. But you know what, I still think the remixes are as strong today as they were when I made them.

Geld played live at Uppsala Konsert & Kongress in 2008 and that’s when they released the CDR, Livshatförgöraren Version 2, containing the remixes. Years later, they released it for free on the internet.

But not only did I make my first remixes, I also made two new friends.

It took quite a while before I started to let the tracks breathe, forgetting about them for a week or two. But I still included them on every album or EP I released.

The first CDR that I released was called Villaförortens hemlighet, and then I used the alias O2FN. It was recorded using two crappy PC speakers and an equally crappy microphone. While each track consisted of at least two, or more, recordings it was still poorly thought through and a spur of the moment track. However, it was what I could do at the time.

If I went back today to re-record or re-arrange that old material, I would of course end up with something completely different. It would also be a lot more cut-up and edited. I’m not saying it would be any better, just different and not done with the same kind of excitement.

Almost a year after the first O2FN release I had gotten a lot more into noise and also bought a couple of pedals and a mixer. That eventually led to creating the alias Reversed Obesity, which still exists, because it wasn’t what Hjorten was.

Once again I used everything I recorded, and I rarely thought twice about the material. The first Reversed Obesity release was an mp3 EP and a full-length album named World came along shortly. But on World I had actually gone through the recordings. I don’t know how many recordings I made, but there were seven tracks on the album.

Lets not talk about the noise releases that followed World, there’s no point in talking about how half of Definition was recorded when I was drunk and unemployed.

In January 2011 I suddenly found myself in a bad state of mind, so I turned to noise once again. However, this time was different. Not only did I have more equipment, I also had more experience and ideas. I experimented and improvised more than before, and everything was recorded. In total it turned into around 50 hours worth of noise.

Weeks after initial recording, I sat down and listened through all of the material, editing and cutting out pieces I liked. Once I had what I thought would be enough I started to actually compose noise rather than just calling it a track. I let the composing take whatever time it needed and in the end I had ten complete tracks.

Around three months after I knew it was it complete, I went back to it. Listened to it over and over again, and I slowly realized that it was too much, and the tracklist was off. In the end I got rid of five tracks, re-arranged the tracklist several times. And now that I’ve sent it off to a label hoping that they will want to release it, I can actually say that I couldn’t have done more with it. It is as good as I can ever make it.

Of course, that only goes for that specific album.

(Picture 1 & 2: O2FN equipment. Picture 3: Reversed Obesity equipment used in 2007.)

In this digital world, I guess I’m still thinking the old way of releasing music. I would probably get more listeners (or “fans”) if I uploaded tracks on a regular basis, but these days music takes a long time for me to make. Now, I’m not saying David uploads too much music or anything. It’s just that we have a different ways of going about it. And the same goes for another friend of mine, Manifesto, he’s even more analog thinking than I am. And I’d say that either way is the right way.

I like the whole process of coming up with a theme or just a basic idea and then see where it takes me, though usually once I get an idea, the whole project unravels in my head. One or two years ago, one idea could be long tracks (we’re talking 20-30 minutes), and that was more or less a standard I had. Lately it’s not about the length (it wasn’t soley about the length before, of course), but what I want to get through, or what I can get through. Maybe there’s something more I want to do with the track, but I just can’t, so I leave it at what it is. In way it’s incomplete, but the more I listen to it, the more complete it gets.

I may have lost the initial point I was trying to make, if there even was one, but bottom-line is: everyone has different ways of making what they do, and different paces they work in. In the end it doesn’t really matter how you get there, just that you do.

Okay, it’s half past one in the night and I need to get to bed, please excause any typos in this rant.