"WORLD IS AN AGGRESSOR!"

Finally we can announce that our Aggressor single is being mastered and should be ready for production during this week. It has been a painful process because of our label's (and our own) timeschedules. We need to fasten things up when we start to record and mix the full length album..it's just frustrating that we have managed to use so many months for this small release..Well I think that the outcome of it is really good and I'm anxious to hear what people have to say about it.

Now we are mixing (at first on our own) the title song of our upcoming full length album, it holds some good old punk-aggression-spirit with a bld-metal touch and it's turning out to be quite a baseball-bat beating "ear-catcher". It is a song about frustration and ..well, aggression BUT in a good spirit, heh.

One thing that we are really looking forward is the Graveyard Party -happening and our gig in it. There's just an excellent line-up with artists such as Hanzel Und Gretyl, Diary Of Dreams, Turmion Kätilöt, Proteus etc. Hope to see you all there!

Meanwhile, go and get your asses signed to this lottery that the event is arranging:
http://www.graveyardparty.com/lottery

/ Janne

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ABOUT PREVIOUS GIGS AND UPCOMING RELEASE

The last couple of months have been surprisingly busy as we've done some gigs at Finland's summerfestivals. The last one was Tuska festival's after party at Virgin oil with Turmion Kätilöt and Fear Of Domination and I'd say it was our best gig so far. The venue was fully booked and the show went really well. This time we managed to spice our performance up a bit with two gogo-girls dancing to the beats of "Tides" and "Words Have A Meaning". I think the crowd liked that!

Also our gig at Nummirock was interesting. It was the biggest stage yet for us (the mainstage), but there weren't so many people in the crowd. I quess the timing for the show was maybe the worst possible in Finland; the morning after Midsummer's eve! Anyway we were really pleased to play this gig and we got some valuable experience on bigger stages. We also received good feedback from there and hopefully we can play there again next year with a bit better spot this time. We added some pictures from this gig under Gallery-link.

Eastrock Bikemeet (located at Polvijärvi, Finland) suffered quite a loss of participants as well because of a really shitty weather during the whole weekend. This was a pity since the happening was well organized and I'd say there was the best catering we've experienced; bands had their own pizza-baker in use and an open bar during the evening! I'd say we absolutely want to play there next year also!

Now we have a change to get some rest from gigging and start to concentrate more to our new material. Actually yesterday we decided the name of our next album (won't reveal it yet..) and also discussed about the graphics theme for the cover. We still need to finish a couple of songs for this release and after that we'll start the recording process. This album will also be released by our label Osasto-A. This time we'll handle all the recording ourselves. MC Raaka Pee will join the process when we start mixing. This way we can work little faster since we don't need to combine our timetables with anyone else's.

Our next gig will be at KuopioRock's after party in Henry's Pub. I think for that show we'll get a couple of new songs ready for performance. If they turn out great, we'll include them to the upcoming album.

/ Janne
ps. There's a new Empire t-shirt for sale, check out Osasto-A's webstore for more info (sorry, at the moment only in finnish!)

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GIGS, MANTRAS AND TRAINING SESSIONS

Summerfestivals are coming and we'll be playing live on at least three of them in Finland. We will inform about them later when the festivals have published the info first. We have been saying the same mantra for about three years now: "The next summer BLD will be playing live on the festivals".. so this time it really seems to come true, which is great. So now we can change it to "Next year BLD will be playing live outside Finland's borders"..

Last weekend was a training weekend for us and we tried 6 of our new songs the first time. We decided to add three of them to our next live-set. Two of those are new BLD-songs ("Walls inside us", and "Against Each Other") and one is a cover song from Placebo's song The Bitter End.
We feel that it's essential to take new songs to our set although we haven't played even the Empire's songs really much. This is because we want to test our new material live before releasing them and also because otherwise we might get bored!

/ Janne


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SOME THOUGHTS

A lot has happened since the last time this blog was updated. Our debut album Empire was released in Finland. Feedback from it has been quite a mixture of good and bad. Actually it seems that individuals appreciate it a lot more than critics. Well, there has been some reviews which have been very flattering. Anyway it has been interesting to listen what people have to say about Empire. Now the main thing for us is to get some publicity for the band and for the album.

Our music video Tides has been aired on finnish Music Television and on channel two. It was also published on the internet. Feedback from this video has been really positive. Now we are also trying to get it on foreign coutries' playlists. There has been some promises already but we'll inform about them when we get a verification first.

We have started gigging more actively; latest gig was with Mortiis march 20th at Teatria-Oulu. Teatria was a really good place to play live and all the arrangements worked perfectly. It was also nice to meet the members of Mortiis. We are going to do (and have done already) some gigs together with our dear friend Proteus. This kind of combination (metal-industrial-hard nrg) should be interesting and rare for finnish audience. Next gig will be at this week's friday (Imatra / Woodoo).

There's also quite many new songs being processed at the moment. Actually we are planning to release some new material quite soon with Proteus' remix track from For All You Heavy-Hearted. You can listen a preview from here.

/ Janne


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YES, WE ARE STILL HERE AND STILL BUSY

Last week or two has been quite hectic.
This week we got a glance of the video which is being processed by the film-grew.
Im happy to say that it looks really, really good already!
The grew has carefully promised us that everything will be ready on next monday.
We will not distribute the video itself right away in internet. This is because we want to give the tv-stations the possibility to show it first.
If you want to see it quickly then come to our record's listening party in Kuopio or in Helsinki. Well It's not yet absolutely sure wether the video can be shown then or not. It's all up to our film grew. Also the record itself will be for sale during the evening for 16€. So that's one more reason to drag your lazy ass to the scene!

Yesterday we spent way too many hours with Völe for answering the interviews of different magazines. At first it feels like a fun task to do, but when you start to think about what you really want to say and what kind of impressions you don't want to give for the people, then it's not sun fun anymore. Me and Völe are both the kind of persons who'd rather let the music speak for itself, but of course all the publicity is really essential at the moment.
Well we decided not to take these things too seriously..you'll see..

So...six more nights for Empire's release, this is getting kind of interesting, don't you think?

/ Janne

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THE UNBEATABLE WEEKEND

As mentioned earlier, BLD has gotten the privilege to make our first music video with a real film crew. As the brainstorming of ideas for the script and the practical aspects of the shoot were taken care of, the hard work could be started. The acts of labour were to be situated in Kallahti, Helsinki and the first weekend in November was scheduled for the shoot. Even though some last minute setbacks were encountered, the magicians in the team were able to conjure some heavy duty hardware on to the location. With these the beauty of Finnish nature in autumn and the age mangled, weary faces of the band could well be caught on tape.

 Artillery was pounding and the troops were rushing. The plot of the video was filmed in two locations which included a really cool ship as a fishing boat in the grips of Scylla and Kharybdis. Cars were running and actors a.k.a. the band were warming their cold, stiff muscles every chance we got. The enthusiasm of the crew was overwhelming and we could only wonder how they managed the days with maybe one or two breaks in between. Of course the wonder and astonishment wasn't present until after the shoot because during, while sitting in the comfort of a warm Skoda Roomster, thoughts were pretty much on keeping warm… and eating chocolate provided by our very dear friend Mc Raaka P.

 Now as we, and hopefully also the crew, have gotten our heads and bodies back together, we're focusing on post production. There are still so many interesting steps to take before the video is finished and it's a shame not to be an active part of this. Well… maybe it's for the best to keep our fat fingers off the editing software.

 Until next time…

/ Antti

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NO MORE "MAKING OF"

After some long days and nights the album is finally mastered and ready to be published!
Because of the tight timeschedule we decided to postpone the publishing day by one more week. So the day is now set to 26th of november.

We will release the websingle "Tides" next week's wednesday (5th of november).
It can be downloaded for free from our website.

Check out next month's music magazines, you might find something familiar in some of them..!

/ Janne

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MAKING OF, PART 3

Well I'll be damned...it is now certain that we can get all those 11 tracks ready for tomorrow.
During the past weekend we finished songs called "Hey boy I know", "Confession equals salvation" and "So much better". So there is only "The song by heart" left for us to work on for today. Now it is up to our distributor and record label to organize all the rest so that the album will be in stores at 12th of November. Of course, to make things more interesting, it is yet uncertain if this is logistically possible or not.

I'm assuming that mastering of these tracks can be done during today and tomorrow..if so, then we wil release our web-single "Tides" possibly this wednesday.

Yesterday evening / night we sent the finished songs for the rest of our band members. Everyone seemed very pleased about the outcome. Well except Toni who is visiting somewhere in northern Finland behind a web connection which would take about 25 hours to download one song. Toni; don't forget to buy the record at 12th of November and tell us what you think!

/ Janne

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Horrors at sea and a couple of fishermen...

Today, the 25th of October, was the first time the script of the video got some flesh around the bones. We had a meeting with the videoteam and I'm pretty optimistic about how the whole thing is organized. The director, Jesse Jokela, is currently in England, but thanks to some great engineering, the Internet provided a way of communicating with the team.

As mentioned earlier in Janne's post, the video will be made of the song Tides, which is also the first single. The lyrics feature a story based on a notion of what it's like to choose a lesser evil from to evils and it's entwined in a mythic story about Scylla and Charybdis. The script places the band shipwrecked on a shore facing some truly challenging debate on human behaviour. We're really looking forward to seeing all of this take shape and come to life.

It's a relief to let the project lay in good hands. The team has done some seriously convincing projects together, so it'll be amazing to see these people in action. We still have a lot to do since there's only a week left before the filming starts. Still chins are up and the collective mind is positive the video is bound to be at least as tight as a witch's cleft.

I'll be back with more on the project later.

 -Antti / BLD

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MAKING OF, PART 2

At the moment we have only couple of days left to get everything ready for the album (if we want to release it next month). We don't know wether it can be done or not. Well soon we'll see..

Tomorrow will be a long day at the studio, as it also was at tuesday when I was mixing the album with Petja about 13 hours. At that time we got the songs titled "For all you heavy-hearted" and "Same story, different people" about ready for mastering. "For all you heavy-hearted" includes also Proteus as a visiting artist with vocoders and turntables. In my opinion it sounds excellent and will be a great song for some serious headbanging!

Next weekend should be interesting as we are going to Helsinki to film our music video during two or three days.

/ Janne
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MAKING OF...

Our debut album is on it's way to be released! At the moment we have the finished cover design and also half of the songs ready for mastering. It will be done at studio Note On by Janne Tolsa.

From these tracks we have chosen the song called "Tides" to be released as a web-single in a couple of weeks (more info about this soon on our website). In our opinion "Tides" is a good choice to represent both metal- and electronic- sides of BLD's music. This song was also one of the "easiest" songs to create; it was almost going to the trash can when Völe heard a demo-version of it and demanded to go forward with it's creation. Luckily it was put back on the drawing board and is now one of the catchiest BLD hits ever!

The timeschedule for the albums release is not decided yet. The following week will set the tune and tell us wether it will be released during november 2008 or January 2009. We'll keep you posted!

/ Janne
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