The Black Guestbook

This book was started in Januari 1996

The liner notes are written by Dan Swanö.
(I apologize for any bad grammar or typos..)

Olof is responsible for the rest (scanning, coding etc..).

Scroll further down to begin your journey...

Edge of Sanity - Crimson

It's no secret that me working with Opeth on 'Orchid' left serious marks in my songwriting from that moment on.

Growing up on symphonic rock I had a 'thing' for unconventional arrangements but after a while I tended to stick to the easier

Verse/Bridge/Chorus stuff in all my writing. Mike and C:o opened up my mind again and the idea of a 1 track album was born.

The EOS guys showed up and we basically had zero ideas. As usual they didn't care much about my concept ideas and had written a few normal songs, that ended up as a Japan bonus for 'Crimson' and one was later used on the 'Evolution' album.

We also recorded a cover version of a Sator track called 'I Wanna go home'. A song we used to sing in the tour bus (a.k.a. green Volvo 343) on our first german tour!!

The writing and the recording of the music was kind of smooth.The lyrics and the singing was harder, but we managed in the end.

Mike Åkerfeldt came over for a few days and did some ripping backing vocals in the black metal vein and also an Andy LaRocque flavored lead guitar.

My childhood friend Anders Måreby did some Death-Cello-Bizarre!! A contact-miked Cello thru a Marshall-stack on 11. Sounds like death itself!!!

The mix was a drag, but I pulled it off much thanx to my digital console. I would still mix that album if it wasn't for snapshots and flying faders!

The sound itself is kind of OK, like all my early work, I spent way too much of my brain capacity being a musician and a producer, so there wasn't much left for the engineer in me.

I had just got a hold of a BBE maximizer and I used the shit out of it on the mix bus, which wasn't the smartest thing to do, because it made the whole sound harsh!!

Peter in de Betou made a good job mastering it at Cutting Room, and we also made a last minute edit to give the album the desired 40:00 playing time.

(Wikipedia)     (Metal Archives)

Honk The Horn

I knew Dale from back in the Finspång days when he recorded with Suckerfish a bunch of times.

I also knew Ruud from his time with Cripple. HTH was a different beast though

Some kind of fucked up grunge rock. What I remember is that the drummers father showed up and recorded some ass kicking tablas and that I miked up Ruud singing and drinking water straight from the tap in the kitchen....

I also think that the ex-bassplayer from Wolf, Mumlan showed for a tennis rack solo????

From that moment on I thought he was a non-musician yokel, but I was proven wrong when I recorded the first Wolf EP years later.

He could really play the shit out of a bass guitar.

Millencolin - Move Your Car

This band needs no further introduction I presume.

These guys were loyal to me thru thick and thin. I am forever grateful.

This time around we did 'Entrance at Rudebrook' and a Dolly Parton cover!! '9 to 5'

I haven't heard the result in a long time, but it wouldn't surprise me if it sounds better than some of the albums I did with them.

I always did better on the unimportant short B-sides than on the full-lengths. Much due to the fact that I didn't lose my interest or my hearing ;)

Ancient - The Cainian Chronicle

One guy came all the way from the States.

The others came from Norway. This album turned out pretty cool.

I remember that we had the HUGE reverb on the toms and a pretty raw guitar sound.

The guitar player had some fancy guitar for a lot of money, but in the end we used my battered Ibanez because it actually tuned right...

A girl called Kimberly Goss showed up and did some singing. It was her first time in a studio and she was so nervous.

I did my best to be a good coach and try to help her nailing a good take!!

It turned out cool in the end and she went on to form SINERGY amongst others.

(Metal Archives)

Novembre

I never cared much about the songs while we recorded the basic tracks.

I felt they were too weird and 'the same' all the time, but during the mix I began to like it and it inspired me to work with repetition on 'Sun of the night' from Moontower.

The guys are Italian and 2 of the members are brothers.

This incarnation of Unisound had the drums in a room faraway and there was no visual contact between the control room and the drum room.

When they recorded the drums to a scratch guitar all would seem fine, but after a while u could hear sticks been thrown all over the place and the guitarist threw his guitar down, the drummer ran out of the booth and somewhere in the hallway they had this huuuuge argument about some fill, or whatever, and after a few minutes of screaming in Italian they hugged and went back in for another take!!

The guys had nothing better to do after I left the studio at 18:00 than to enjoy the 'nightlife' of Örebro.

I went out to the pub a few weeks after they left and some guys sitting there in a corner had put 1 and 1 together and had realized that those damn Italianos had been to my studio and they gave me a hard time, proclaiming that it was impossible to pick up any girls when these guys were in the pub!!

The mix turned out pretty cool. I had just bought a new drum kit (Pearl Custom Z..their 'Rolls Royce' model around that time) and it was the first time I recorded it. It sounded cool. We managed to sample the kick drum from Dream Theater's 'Awake' and used that for the whole record. I also did my best to get the Inverse effect from the 'Awake-Snare'.

I Haven't heard this album in a long time, but I think my work did nothing to damage the reputation from the guys.

Opeth - Morningrise

This was the third time the guys came around.

First it was 'Orchid' in Finspång and they were among the very first to record at my new location in the big black tower at Klostergatan, Järntorget, Örebro.

(They did an excellent version of 'Circle of the tyrants')

The first day Anders (old drummer) and Mike showed up and we nailed the drum sound pretty quick.

During a pizza break I suggested that the guys recorded a part of a song with all guitars, bass etc.

to see if the drum sound had enough bite to cut thru a full mix or if we needed to adjust anything.

I am not really sure how the discussion started, but we started to discuss which music style that was the most 'Out' at the time (3/3 1996) and we all decided that it was 'Heavy Metal, a bit Manowar, a bit Judas Priest around Defenders, German metal etc.' and then we decided to record a song of our own.

A new project was born. STEEL!!! Said and done. We went back to the studio and recorded a short song called 'Guitars & Metal' and did all the necessary overdubs to make sure the drums worked.

We laughed our brains out!! At this point in time nobody would have believed that the next big export from Sweden would be Hammerfall!!!

I don't remember that much from this recording. I know that we had almost a month of studio time, which was a record for me.

Before mixing we felt a bit 'over' and went to buy some second hand furniture to re-arrange the studio!!

This was also the first time I used my latest purchase, the all digital Roland VS880!

I synced it up to the E-16 and it gave me a total of 23 tracks to play with!

We recorded all the acoustics and the vocals on it.

We used the custom Z drum kit again and I had bought a new setup of Sennheiser Tom-mikes and they sounded really good without any EQ or compression, so I made the choice to manually 'ride' all the toms in the mix instead of gating them. And another gadget I had bought was a sampler from Roland that enabled me to sample a good hit from the drum, EQ it like I wanted it without worrying too much about spill and them replace the real kick and snare with samples of the same, unless when Anders played something too complicated for the trigger to 'read'

I put all the MIDI from the D4 (That I used to trigger the kick/snare) into Cubase in my Atari MEGA4 (with 30 Megabyte hard drive!!!!) and pushed it backwards in time with as much as the D4 delayed the trig pulses.

It sounded much tighter and better than to trigger 'live' with gives and annoying 'flam'

This took a few days, and looking back it wasn't the best thing to do.

The drums sound absolutely lifeless and really boring. Sorry guys.

I haven't listened to the album since it came out and I don't remember that much.

I do remember that I helped Mike with one vocal line going 'You are in a forest unknown'.

That is the closest I ever came to produce Opeth ;)

For guitars I am pretty sure we used a JCM800 with a vintage cabinet, but probably with some pedal in front.

(Wikipedia)

Nightingale

After the pretty successful "The Breathing Shadow" experiment, I was pretty tired of the whole D.I.Y. of solo albums.

I remember writing "Deep inside of nowhere" on my old Östlind & Almquist piano in the bedroom at Skolgatan.

I started messing about with the black keys on the piano and got all weird kinds of interesting chord changes.

During the interview session for The Breathing Shadow I pretty decided to give up Unicorn and focus on other stuff.

Two songs that I had written for Unicorn was "nightingalelified" (So Long and Alive Again)

and Revival was "accidentally" written on the kitchen floor on my old Sigma guitar the night before Dag would show up

and the recording/writing would begin. I have no recollections of how "Thoughts from a stolen soul" came to life.

I know the chorus "borrowed" from a song I heard on Rock Box and that Dagge wrote much of the "un-gothy" parts.

I also remember that I borrowed a Korg A1 from Musikbörsen and used that together with a Samson power amp

and a vintage cabinet on all the songs except for the stuff Dagge played (and Steal The Moon, which was an old song I just threw in there to make the album longer!!

A nice solution. We play it live all the time!!) One morning I woke up and it felt like my pillow was still stuck to my right side.

I had gone 100% deaf on my right ear! I panicked of course and went to the doctor and they flushed out the largest Wax-plop ever seen!!!

Before I got my hearing back I had to start with the vocals. Not easy to sing nice when u only hear from one ear (God knows how Paul Stanley does it...)

Other memories are that I hit the top note on the chorus from "Revival" only 1 time and copied it within my VS880 to the other choruses.

I still think that note sucks, and I haven't been able to reach it since then!! To me the perfect version is on the "Nightfall Overture" album!!

And another fine memory is when some doofkopf at the power plant decided to pull the wrong plug and the whole of Örebro went black!!

I had just finished a vocal take and did some seriously hardcore editing in my VS880 (this is the painstaking process of setting co-ordinates in the audio and shit...not the easy way with click and drag like today!!!) and BOOOF!!!

The cones on my Genelecs where a meter outside the cabinet and the sound reminds me of a Train-horn on acid...then all went silent!

I had not saved my work is the VS, so I knew all that was lost....but would the equipment survive??

I got the vibe there was a moment of 2220 Volt instead 220!! I looked around me and the whole town was out in the street checking if anybody had electricity.

I went to Musikbörsen to see how far it had spread, then these guys sat outside he shop and had a coffee!!!

The electricity came back on and all the stuff survived..but not my edits of course.

Since that day I saved so frequently I actually wore the button out and had to replace the whole shell from the VS!!!!

Sound wise this album sounds a little bit odd. A bit too harsh and strange. I had a sound similar to "Empire" in mind.

But it turned out nowhere near it... I mastered it at Cutting Room with Peter In de Betou, but there was nothing major he could do to improve things.

The songs and vibe is excellent and that is what counts in the long run!!

Bay Laurel

I expected a Gothband with long robes and a dark outlook on life.

Boy, what I was mistaken! The coolest guys around stepped in and kicked my ass with some really cool 70's rock..something...

Rickard is a true mastermind and he produced the whole thing and I am pretty sure he had a finger in every note or hit played on this record.

My memories are that they wanted a dead-dry drum sound and the guitar player had a Roland JazzChorus amp!

Rickard did all the vocals alone in the drum booth with the VS machine. He had a real good vibe going in there and He enjoyed working alone.

There is so much emotion in his vocal performances I get goosebumps just thinking about it!!

The track "Paint" is amazing and I also love "Blue". The rest of the album is alright, but a bit too "rock" for me.

I remember showing Rickard the Nightingale tuning (DADADE) and he said... "Aah..cool" and wrote a song using that tuning and recorded it as a B-side to the "Lost in black love" EP!!

Quick dude!!! The sound is pretty cool. Very dry and "seventiesy"!!

I used a pair Symetrix 501 compressors across the mix bus, and I can hear them pump nice!!

The record they made after this, that actually was released, is much better and the sound is amazing on that one!!

Torment

Don't remember much from this session at all.

I had worked with one of the guys before on a Vinterland record.

The music was kind of thrashy and the drummer had a rough time nailing some double kick parts and I let them go at it alone during evenings an nights.

Once he had nailed it, some of the microphones had been pushed out of position.

But I think I managed to save it anyway. Haven't heard this record since it was mixed, so I have no idea how it turned out.

Proboscis

This is one of the more professional bands I ever had the joy to work with.

The guys brought all their own back line, and I think the drums alone costed more than my entire studio :)

My memories of this recording is that the drummer (of finnish origin) was happy like a kid of Xmas eve when he had nailed the drums and reverted to my coach and opened a bottle of vodka and was pissed out of his skull within minutes :)

He deserved it, because his drumming remains Unisound top 10 of all time.

And all he talked about was his guitar playing!!??!!!

Some people have way too much talent! The other instrumentalists were top notch too.

They nailed their takes with such perfection that I almost got scared!!

I remember that their singer recorded all his vocals alone, using my beloved VS880.

I got the vibe that he loved being his "own boss" and could carefully complete his growls/screams while we went on with the rest of the takes.

I love this record. The snare drum sounds a bit like a cowbell and the kick drums like an electronic typewriter (Morrissound style) but that still cannot mess up the awesomeness that is this record. Buy it if you find it.

I do some nasty back-up vocals here too!! Out of the ashes. Into the fire!!

Ps. there is an instrumental song on the album that is by far the best instrumental song I ever recorded Ps.

Under Black Clouds

2 guys from Germany. One played bass and the other sang.

I played rhythm guitars on this one, and the drums had been programmed by some goth rocker on an Alesis SR16.

It was some kind of Death/Thrash metal if I don't remember wrong.

What I remember most from the session is that I had just come home from a pretty disastrous tour with Edge Of Sanity, and was fucked up both mentally and physically and spend most of the time laying on the couch in the control room, complaining about life in general. The guys were sweethearts and bought me chocolate and assorted candy so I would feel better :)

They will make great fathers :)

Crap

Is a local demo band that consisted of some of the most prolific musicians on the Örebro Scene at the moment.

This was also a bit of a producer job for me. The guys had this idea to go a little bit indie with the guitar work, and wanted to use big open chords with much distortion, but it just sounded off, and after they had tuned their guitars for the whole first day, we decided to re-arrange the guitar parts and make sure that we got all the harmonics in there but stayed with the 'max 2 strings at a time' approach to the guitar work. The songs are excellent.

It is a shame nothing ever happened with these guys! A bit later they changed their name to Zed Is Dead and recorded some demos with Mieszko (R.I.P.) at Soundlab.

One classic lyrics is "a girl with a face like Gary Moore!!!"

Nightingale

Nightingale was still officially only me around this time, but once again I invited my brother Dag to help me out with these cover versions.

Since "The closing Chronicles" was anything but a gothic rock record, I figured I'd make some bonus tracks in total goth versions.

Drum-machine, computer bass and the whole she-bang.

The EP was never released and 2 of the songs have been released, "Before the Dawn" remains unreleased (I think).

Katatonia - Brave Murder Day

Since the guys had some kind of girlfriend related "war" going on Katatonia was Nyströms project now.

He and I had all these fantastic ideas for it.

He wanted to make some kind of Chris Isaak metal or something like that, but just days before, he called and said that Jonas and he "made peace" and that Katatonia was back!!!

Since Jonas always was the dark side of Katatonia, I feared the worst :)

And I was right. The songs were the most dissonant, strange stuff I had heard in a long time.

And I must admit that I was a bit disappointed with the whole "turn out" of this session. But once Micke Åkerfeldt was begged down to Örebro to rescue the vocals, the album started to become a different beast.

Bleak as fuck and with a really thin and strange production that somehow struck a nerve with people.

I even heard some Finnish band that cloned the sound down to the last detail.

Coercion

A bunch of fantastic guys. Really fucking great death metal too!!

At this point in time old school Swe-death metal was almost distinct and Black Metal was new deal.

The recordings went smooth and I remember that we did a first mix that I felt didnŽt quite cut it, so I invited the guys back for a free remix. I always had a soft spot for friendly guys that paid out of their own pocket. Good shit.

Tristitia

Don't remember that much from this session.

It was 2 friendly guys from Halmstad and a drum machine.

The music was really doomy and I think it turned out pretty cool!

Not sure that I ever heard it again once it was mixed.

Steel - Heavy Metal Machine

A now legendary session. You can read about the beginning of Steel in the Opeth section above..

We decided that we should get together and have some real fun and record a bunch of Accept meets Judas Priest around 82-84 kind of metal.

3/4's of Opeth showed up and I joined in on "vocals".

I had the basic ideas written for Heavy Metal Machine and Mike had a kick ass riff for Rock Tonite.

Say Goodbye (to love) was written pretty much on the spot, once we figured we'd have a kick ass power ballad too:)

By the time I had recorded half the vocals for Rock Tonite I realized that belting out notes that even dogs have a hard time to hear, was fucking exhausting :)

The first takes the guys were laughing their asses off in the kitchen.

But the time we got to dubbing vocals for Heavy Metal Machine my "siren" had become more of an annoying noise.

Even for me:) The first and sadly misplaced Steel song "Guitars & Metal" had been the centerpiece in the stereo at a party we all went to.

Now we went to another party with the same crowd and we played them the new demo, and nobody was laughing.

They all said "It's too good .No one will get that you are joking"

To us it was the biggest joke ever, but maybe they were right!!??

Would people seriously believe that 3/4 of Opeth and myself had jumped on the Hammerfall trend??

That would suck. So I put the STEEL demo away in a box never to be opened.

Until one day, and offer came from Near Dark in Sundsvall.

These fantastic guys wanted to release 2 songs from this session on a 7" picture disc.

I just couldn't stop the record collector in me, and with the approval of the other guys, we went for it!

It looks fantastic with an evil car on the front.

If you wonder why there is no band photo on the yearbook page.

Well, we held a legendary photo session in my basement.

We all saved as much beard we could, then all shaved all off, except the mustaches, and posed our souls out.

Here ends all with this session.Peter once told me the photos looked amazing, but I never got any. I never ever saw them.

I have been ready to go to Stockholm and knock on his door many times, just to see one photo with all of us in mustache.

I remember that Anders and mine were huge. Anders won, which I clear vibe of Tom Selleck :)

The sessions have been recently remastered and will be released first on vinyl, then on CD by Vic records.

Prepare for attack, for I am the soldier of Steeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

(And if you happen to know Peter from ex-Opeth. Please ask him to scan a photo from the session and send to me. The yearbook is not complete without it)

(Wikipedia)     (Metal Archives)

Coercion

I guess they came back and finished some stuff later on, because here they are again :)

Diabolical Masquerade

Anders showed up with a friend called Roger (I think) and a whole shit load of great black metal stuff.

I programmed the drums and did some keyboards. he played guitars and bass, and sang.

I also did some backing heavy metal Steel-style vocals on "Hater".

What I remember most from this session was that the guys thought the studio was haunted.

They said they heard strange noises from the big black "space" over the studio - see picture here: www.unisound.se/Jerntorget_1924.jpg

and also laughter from a little child thru the walls!!!

The way I understood the structure of the building, there was nothing behind that wall but a big storage space.

Some time later I heard the voices too.I was all alone and scared shitless!

In order to remain sane, I had reevaluate my architectural knowledge of the building and started thinking, and came to the conclusion, that behind a small portion of the wall that led "nowhere" was actually the outside of the wall from the bathroom of someone living on the floor below me.

I put my ear to the wall and clearly heard a child having a good time in the bath with her mother trying to wash her hair, or something. So much for the evil voices in the wall:)

59 Times The Pain

This was the 3rd time I worked with these guys.Really nice guys. I still run into Larnhed from time to time.

He is running a management these days and we usually end up talking about KISS or the "good ol' days" at Rockborgen/Fagersta :)

Unfortunately I don't remember much from this record. I think it turned out pretty cool.

I remember that Peter/Abyss called me one day and asked what the fuck I had did to get the toms to sound so fat.

I told him that I had miked them from the inside (old 70's trick) and then EQ'd the shit out of them!

Godgory

At this point I had worked with these guys 2 times before.

This time around the drummer and 'band brain' Erik wanted to use programmed drums instead of the real deal like before.

This meant a lot of extra work for me of course, but I am always eager to please my customers and after a whole evening of finding the perfect kick and snare, we started programming.

Erik isn't a 'flashy' drummer and their music style worked best with this big samples for drums.

We spent sometime with the rhythm guitars. Determined to make them super tight.

This was one of the first all digital albums I did at Unisound.

All the stuff was recorded on my VS880 machine and it enabled us to copy and paste stuff when needed.

The rhythm guitarplayer was incredibly good with his timing and the whole procedure went smooth as far as I can remember. The guitar sound turned out a little strange, but In those days I didnŽt work with reference records and just worked with what sounded right from 'the gut'.

Looking back it was kind of stupid and naive, but this was before all records sounded the same :)

The other stuff went by without any trouble too. The other band members were 'borrowed' from another Karlstad band called 'World Of Silence' and they knew their shit.

Any other memory I have from this recording is that I had a polaroid camera to shoot the bands for the guestbook.

They got a hold of it and took an nice snapshot of the rhythm guitarists hair ass and put on the front door.

So when I got there in the morning and put the key in the lock I saw this nice 'portrait'!!! A classic!!

Ghostorm

A talented bunch of guys from Lithuania, always cheered on by their cool cartoon-like manager Sekla!!

This was the 2nd record we made together. The guys arrived with a complete set of....everything. Drums, amps, lots of food and drinks!

They knew Sweden was expensive compared to Lithuania. The recording was pretty short in time, but still they paid around the same money that a Lithuanian factory worker made in a year!!!!

Sekla borrowed the money from him grandmother or something!!! Musically it was pretty cool. Incredibly tight stuff.

Actually a bit ahead of their time. Much bands today sounds like Ghostorm did then.

We recorded the drums on analog tape and mixed down a guidetrack to the VS machine and cut as much as possible digital.

The problem is the analog/digital synchronization thing was new to me and I simply forgot to slave the

VS to the Analog machine when I recorded the scratch track.

So once I started mixing and wanted to use the multitrack in sync with the VS the whole shit was out of time.

All the time. The was a 'drift' all the time and I had to manually 'chase' the analog machine, matching the scratch track to the multitrack but cutting out or insert tiny pieces of data on the VS.

This was all done without a mouse and other luxury from todays digital systems.

It took fucking forever and they had spent such a long time making the rhythm guitars tight as fuck...and I didnŽt wanna mess it up.

It was many hours of overtime this session. I think it turned out cool in the end. But I learned to slave the VS, the hard way!!

Another funny anecdote is that I was asked to sing a whole song on the record and I just wasnŽt up for it.

Sekla asked me a million times and begged me to change my mind, but I was not up for it.

Clean vocals is always a painstaking process for me. I have a good ear for pitch and hate to hear myself out of tune on records when there isnŽt enough time to really get each syllable right!

The day of the vocal takes arrived and I was still not buying the idea of me singing their power ballad.

Anyhow. During the lunch break I was at the alcohol shop. I was asked to buy some of the new 'alcopops' that was brand new and responsible for intoxicating a whole generation of teens!

I am a sucker for anything sweet and bought a few extra to drink during the last shift. I mean, how bad could it be?

The studio had no air condition and the control room had no windows close so it was fucking hot in there during the summer and I suddenly remembered the ice cold beverages and drank one so fast I had a brain freeze.

And the next of followed pretty much right after that. I began to feel a little less uptight about life in general and after hearing their growling singer try with the ballad for the 14th time I pretty much went into the vocal booth, threw him out and said 'IŽll do this!' and nailed the whole song in a few incredibly inspired takes!! Drunk as a skunk!!

I donŽt remember much of that afternoon, but I was told the story all the time from the guys, because they thought it was so funny how I could switch from this 'No guy' to the 'Yes man'..just because of a few funny colored drinks..

Thank you Hooch!!! The album was later released by some obscure label and disappeared without a trace.

Exhumation

What I remember most from this session is the nonmusical stuff like how the guys took a cab from Uppsala to Örebro!!!!

Must've costed a fucking fortune!!! And when it was time to pay they had brought cash, and had already exchanged the money in Greece and I received a shit load of the almost ancient "Big size Gustav Wasa" 100 swedish crown bills. I remember those from my childhood!!

I knew I had heard something about them being worthless soon and felt a chill to the bone!! I rushed to the bank and the counter there was a big sticker saying something like "these 100 bills will be worth nothing this and that date...." and I think it was only weeks away from being worth 0:-

Puuh!! Another thing I remember is me guesting on some backing vocals. Both clean and growl, I think.

I honestly haven't listened to this album in about 10 years but I still remember some of the vocal parts I sang.

Really catchy stuff!! One of the guitar players (Marios) moved to Gothenburg to start Nightrage. The rest I don't know.

De Infernali

Jon Nödtveidt was a cool guy!! This time he had the idea to do some Industrial Satanic Techno!!

I went to Musikbörsen and rented every synth they had but we ended up using one called 'Technosaurus' I programmed some techno stuff in the Atari and they screamed about Satan on top of it...They were supposed to be 2 guys, but in the end they brought along a funny character a.k.a. 'Bajsmannen' (The Shitman) known for his affection to all things brown and smelly.

He was supposed to produce the record and had brought along some old Alesis sequencer and wanted to work with that.

After a few days of nothing coming out of their collaboration, they send him home and we went to work with the Atari and finished the album.

Stuff I remember is: I sing on one song, sounds like a cross of E-Type and Iron Maiden. Pretty nice. My most vivid memories is pretty non-musical. T hey all have something to do with the insane Bajsman! Where do I start?? He got arrested and also lost the keys to the studio after a night on the town.

Apparently he had been stage diving down bicycles outside a local bar. Naked!!! I donŽt dare to think where he put the keys before losing them ;)

What else?? I remember his putting cans of beer in the freezer for the alcohol to separate from the rest and then he nailed a screwdriver thru the can and sucked the 'goodie stuff' out of it with a straw.....

I was told he slept 45 minute during 48 hours!!! The guys had a party at the studio when I was at home and they danced on the roof (The studio was located in the top of a pretty high building) They drank my 2 liter Lithuanian Vodka 'Souvenir' bottle. Broke some chairs. Sick!!!

Millencolin

At this time I had lost count of the times we had worked together, This time around things would be a little bit more problematic than before.

The band had been touring much since their break-thru with 'Life on a plate' and there were dark clouds over the big black tower at Järntorget.

This time around the guys had less material than ever.

We had to patch together some songs from loose ideas and some stuff turned out really classy, like 'Twenty-Two' and some other stuff not so good 'Monkey Boogie'.

For some reason we decided to call our little team of songwriters 'The Song doctors' instead of giving the involved some real credit.

Back in those days I wouldn't have dreamt of asking for a publishing cut or a producer percentage, I was just glad they came back!!

Some memories from the recording are 1: Blowing up one of their Laney amps when I experimented with different guitar sounds.

The guy who had to repair it said it was Tchernobyl in there!! Ha, ha. I learned that you need to connect a load to the Speaker output or you will simply melt the amp!!

Once again I learn shit the hard way. 2: I used 1 ADAT XT together with the VS 880 giving me a total of 16 tracks digital without any sync problems.

Nice! The punch-ins on the ADAT kicked ass, and it made the whole tracking thing so much easier.

I had also bought an analog Mackie desk to spice up the tracks on the way in and also during the mix.

I used the digitalconsole more for automation of the fader and for the good internal FX.

The song 'Twento Two' is one of my true production/arrangement jobs with Millencolin.

In the past I had helped a lot choosing which of the 15 different vocal harmonies that Kola had sung and made him focus on the best one ;)

But this time it was different. The rough demo was nothing like finished version.

We pretty much took it all down to 0 and went back up from there.

For that one song I was pretty much like a member of Millencolin and they followed me wherever I took the song.

In the end it turned out really cool and it's one of my proudest moments as a true producer!

Gates of Ishtar

At this time I was only waiting to close the studio and start my new job in a music store.

All I can remember from this session is that some of the machinery didn't work properly and that the mix somewhat turned out a little bit synthetic drum wise.

They were all nice guys and I think they travelled really far to work with me.

The end...

Unisound - The Tower Years!!

After a few years of full-time work in a small cellar without windows, air, toilets etc. It was time to move up a notch.
My first idea was to find similar place in Örebro. Maybe not so full of mould, but a bit "friendlier" to myself and the bands.
I sent out a lot of letters and faxes to every place that rented out stuff in the Örebro area. I got 1 answer!!
These guys had obviously only read "Want. To. Rent. Place" and simply "forgot" to read whet put all the others off
"I am opening a recording studio. It will be loud. Weird satanists running round the place 24/7." :)
Anyhow. The place was a normal office space. A big half-circled room. A few smaller rooms and the biggest and most useless hallway ever built..
I was desperate to find something, so I signed a deal. I could always quit it and move. Yeah right. From that day in May 1995, I had only a handful days off until I decided to give up on recording in February 1997. 2 wonderful dudes, Micke and Per from Suckerfish helped me to build a small but effective drumbooth/sauna. I will never forget the day it was ready, and some drummer was asked to bang the shit out of my kit while I went to the place that rented the whole floor beneath the studio.
And of course, the boss form the whole place had his office right under the drumbooth.
I rang the door of Mercuri Urval and staggered into the official and heard. Nothing. Total silence. The booth was a success!! I was so happy I could scream!!
The rest is history.
Enjoy!!

Ps.Of course more bands recorded with me..but I was too busy to think about the yearbook once the first "brown" one was full.So this is just a small selection of the records and demos I did between 1989 and 1997. Ds.



Be sure to check out the older one as well (once it's released)!