Last week, we shot a commercial for Läkerol in an abandoned mansion near Vilnius, Lithuania. The place used to be a soviet era hospital and there was still some medicine cabinets left. The director, Jalmari Helander, offered 50 euros if I tried some pills from the cabinets, but I declined. I could’ve used 50 euros, though. Here’s the film and some shots from the shoot.

Semira and I managed to finish an old song of mine that had been lying in a drawer for several years. It sounds like a decarbonated beer at an empty pub, where the upholstery smells like cigarettes and Rohypnol.

During the holidays I spent my leisure time doing some programming. I’ve been using the simple and brilliant notepad.cc to keep notes I can access anywhere and I thought it might be nice to have a visual todo list alongside it. So, I grabbed my keyboard and went to work.

Features include drag’n'drop sorting of todo items, expandable notes and an automatically saving notepad. It’s made with Ruby on Rails for those interested.

You can check out the app here (you must create an account).

I finished a song I had been working on for some time. The piano parts had been lying around in some form, but I had not been able to construct a song from them. Until now. I had recorded the pianos without a metronome, which is a bit problematic when you want to add percussion etc. First I started re-recording them with a click track, but that took away the feel from the originals, so I decided to extract the tempo from the original recordings instead.

This turned out to be a good decision, as the rubato tempo creates an interesting effect with the electronic elements. Usually electronic music has a fixed tempo, so the changing rhythm sounds unexpected and new. In fact, I think I liked it too much, because the beginning drags on a bit too long, maybe. No matter, it’s still pretty good, and this will probably be a technique I will study further.