Silent Voices: What the fuck is this ?

To shed some light for those of you who have checked out mine and Pasis other band Silent Voices

(silentvoices.net) and wonder whatta hell this is, here’s a brief subjective story about the band.

Enjoy, or Don’t ;- )

In the spring of 1995 I was repeatedly harrassed but this longhaired dude, which whom I played with

@ the rock school in Kokkola. Whenever I saw him drunk somewhere, he was going on about this band of theirs and how they needed me to play the keyboards etc. At some point when I actually saw him outside of the rock school, sober, I decided to put an end to it by letting him have his way and

just pay a visit to their rehersal place. It really backfired since the music they played was awesome

and I had to join the band. Timo Kauppinen (Pasi’s older brother) was the dude in question and appeareantly he’d applied the same sort of guerilla tactics on getting our drummer J-P to join. Effective dude, that’s all I can say.

The summer of 1995 was spent rehersing and writing stuff, for some reason we did write sheet music of all the songs (yeah, nerds, I know) and at some point we had over 40 tunes written out. To be honest, most of it was pure shit but you’ve gotta start somewhere, right. By the end of the summer we thought we where ready to record our first demo, so we did. Since we didn’t have a vocalist we recorded 4 instumental songs and were ready to take on the world. Unfortunately…or maybe it was fortunate, the world didn’t listen. Not the people and not any labels.  We did however find a great singer called Kaj or Kai, he was really into it and things started to look a bit more positive, however he disappeared at some point….and I mean literally we couldn’t find him anymore. He was from out of town so it wasn’t to hard for him to pull a Copperfield but he was never to be seen again. Not our choice.

Nevertheless we started playing some occasional pub gigs whenever we could find them and a few years later we recorded our second demo, an EP titled Nothing Lasts Forever. Yours truly did sing on that and still has a hard time listening to it.No regrets though…just shame ;-)

After a few more gigs in the Bar circuit, supporting Waltari in our hometown being the highlight, our next singer Michael Henneken appeared. Killer voice and an attiude to move mountains. Got him into the studio asap and recorded and released the EP Memory and the Frame, I think this was around 1998 or something. We got to play some festivals, Nummirock 1999 being the coolest one and continued to play for empty bars every now and then. We did some shows with another Finnish progmetal band Malpractise and as the years passed we finally got a deal and did our debut album Chapters of Tragedy (2002, Low Frequency Records). Life went on, we did some horrible videos, some ok ones…every single one of them on a 0 euro budget…got around to do our second album INFERNAL (2004, LFR). That one actually had a lot of bite to it. Fast tempos and we got Michael to sing his ass of by just shouting at him and being mean.It worked and I still like that album to this date.

More empty bar shows and our third album Building up the Apathy (2006,LFR) This was actually around the time that Silent Voices played their first shows without me and last ones so far. I was really busy touring with Sonata and I didn’t want to hold back the guys who really wanted to play shows (like any rock musicians do) so our good friend Jukka Hänninen (of Winterborn fame) filled in for me on a few shows…I think it was in 2006. It was a weird time in my life so I don’t remember it too well.

After Building up the Apathy we had some shows in France lined up but they fell through, which had nothing to do with us but the disappointment was the final straw for Michael who decided it was time to move on. By this time the band was more or less a hobby for everyone else, me filling up my time with Sonata, Pasi already had his studio and Timo and J-P and their own businesses to attend to. Everyone else were happy with the situation but for a dude with high  ambitions this was not the place to be in so….goodspeed dude. At this time our label also seized to exist, however our label dude Kasanen told us to make the next album and payed the bills since his belief was that good music shouldn’t be stopped. Holy shit, what kind of person does that ? There is still good things in life and keep the faith and all good love happiness and whatnot stuff to everyone, if this kind of action doesn’t make you believe that good things might happend then you’re doomed. Anyways I’ll take it a bit easier, but a huge thanks to mr.K.

Having said that, our 4th album proved to take a bit of time. Around 7 years in fact. Since nobody was pushing us, we just wrote and recorded stuff when we felt like it. Appeareantly it wasn’t too ofted but eventually we got the tracks down.We didn’t have a singer so we choose to just ask people to sing on the album. First we tagged our friend Teemu from Winterborn to do the demovocals to all the tracks with the promise of ”letting” him sing one song on the album. That’s how nice we are ;-) Next up, it took some time to get all the vocal stuff done but eventually we finished the album. Sending it out and waiting for a reply took a looong time and no one seemed to want it. Sounds familiar ? Eventually we hooked up with Miro a manager in the UK, taking care of Ripper Owens amongst others and he managed to get us a deal and to become the first manager of Silent Voices (after our first roadie/manager Hannu, Pasi and Timo’s cousin from next door who we wanted along but since he didn’t play anything he mainly wrecked things, drunk the booze, partied like hell and occasionally did carry some equipment or drive the van…ancient history anyway, this was in the ’90’s).

Just before the deal with Ulterium that Miro hooked up, Pasi decided that the album had to be mastered in NYC by Ted Jensen, so he swiped his visa and did it….and it turned out absolutely amazing. Now last summer we did our first shows outside of Finland. In May 2013 we did two club shows in the UK. More or less empty clubs but it was fun as hell and some of the few that showed up actually came for the band which was highly appreciated by us. Thanks guys ! Oh, the singer thing…yeah, we first asked Teemu to do the UK shows, that was the easy solution and we had so much fun and we’re so lazy that it was the easiest way to just make him join the band and voila, we have a singer. On the other hand, it was kind of an obvious choice, great voice, amazing work ethic and a friend from many years…what’s there not to like ?

The other trip we did last summer was to the Czech republic to play on Rockova Ostrava. The organization of the festival was a bit so and so but after a lot of hassle our slot was finally set between Kreator and Ripper Owens….perfect for an unknown band, and so in the evening we got to enjoy the biggest SV audience ever with a couple of thousand people wondering where these guys came for. By the end of the set most of the people seemed to actually enjoy our stuff (or at least that how I wanted to see it): An interesting trip and a bit hard, since I just played my last show of the tour (and last show with Marko) on the 15.8.2013 in France, flew to Helsinki the next day, changed gear and played in Ostrava on the 17.8….Since then Silent Voices have done….nothing !!! That’s not entirely true, Teemu did re-record a couple of old tracks from Infernal and Building up the Apathy. At the moment we’re planning to do a video at some point but now, with both me & Pasi in Sonata, I don’t know when we can do it….we’ll fit it somewhere, I’m sure. Until then Silent Voices takes it easy and hopefully we’ll be able to do some shows next summer.

…that’s about it, regarding to SV, now you know what’s going on and you can check us out at

www.silentvoices.net

cheers,

Henkka