My Home Is My Castle
Like a medieval castle the drummer is protected from the world around by a massive wall of drums . “A great part of my identity comes from finding myself in music.” Apparently, the shy kid Rainer found a safe harbour behind the kit to mentally grow. Then again a castle is also a status symbol which is a reason why Rainer feels at home there. He heard people say: “You really like bloom behind the kit, man.” So showing off, not surprisingly, got important to him as it is to Jarkko. He has no opposition to “let the other ones shine in the front”, which is by the way a healthy approach for fertile team leading as well. Jarkko’s drum kit is his stage “showing off on a stage is really important to me.” It is no less a tool to express himself and fulfil his jobs in BRHG’s band dynamics. Then again Rainer understands that showing off may be an obstacle in band dynamics and creative processes and has worked on cutting it back. Luana’s and Remi’s self-expression runs on a lower profile of letting their performance speak for itself.
Interestingly, to all of them playing drums is not enough to express themselves, even if Jarkko makes very clear that “definitely being on stage” matters more to him than the creative parts of making music. Luana cannot decide what is more important to her while Rainer and Remi prioritize the creative work. Remi here has a focus on that “really weird collaborative thing” of coming up with something that “now only exists when you and me are making this thing together.”— “I could never give up studio. Studio work, I love it.” says Rainer and adds about creative work: “I mean its way more rewarding like eat the food your been making than just got to a buffet table and be like … This is not me!” He says, realizing his customers’ wishes would require a wide spectrum as well as creativity. Listening and imitation are critically important too though. As a little child he used to excessively imitate all kinds of sounds: “I keep repeating until my mom is saying like: ‘Muumi, is our record player broken?`” This has helped to improve his technique but also his understanding of what a customer hopes to get from him in a studio session. The more diverse input he got, the more diverse he could play so diversity is a part of creativity and vice versa.
Kick-ass, Kick-bass or Sidekick?
Being a drummer reduces your role easily to that of a sidekick in public perception and even within the band, or worse within the musical world, as much as their instrument is not even working with the common language.
The Marginal Instrumentalist in a Kick-ass Business
Drummers often do not read notes as those don’t work with drums, which sort of rules out writing music. A conservatory education often depends on being nearly proficient in a second instrument. So often, the rhythm department is merely participating in the creative work, or ‘only’ as far as their instrument is concerned. This holds not true for Luana (interview taken before she left Nervosa) and Jarkko who underline that their bands are very democratic in writing and arranging music. In contrast to Luana, Remi and Jarkko knew their bandmates way before their main bands were founded. The Finns met at school and decided to start a band. The members of Hamferð met at t h e hot spot for popular music in Torshavn. Rainer’s first band also goes all the way back to his childhood. Causemos has been a part of his life forever it seems and exceeded all his further affiliations. None of them are ‘only the drummer’, no sidekick waiting for someone’s ‘go’.
I believe we get more harsh comments than a band composed by man would get, there’s still a lot of sexism going on (Luana Dametto)
Being a Brazilian female metal drummer in an all-female metal band doesn’t get you out of the super-submarginal corner. Even worse, sexism is still omnipresent and faced by female musicians, not only in the form of arrogantly questioning their skills and proficiency. Luana has quite some experiences that a male drummer would never have in that kick-ass business. Sadly enough, tough language and inappropriate behaviour have become more common in general lately.
Luana: “I just see myself as a regular drummer, like any other. The metal scene is mostly composed by men, so of course, being a women sometimes is not the best thing ever. We do get more attention cause we are three young women playing metal, but that’s not 100% positive. I believe we get more harsh comments than a band composed by man would get, there’s still a lot of sexism going on, I won’t say it’s the majority, but there is, and this make some people think that women are not as able to play an instrument. Then, we have the comments… On stage sometimes, people wants to teach us how to set up our own instruments that we play for more than 10 years, and even playing a regular Thrash Metal as a male band, the male band will be just a regular band, we will be “boring”, “too simple”, “bad”. The critics are much harder if you’re a woman, you need to prove you know how to play all the time, you need to be showing that you can’t do your things without a man, and mostly important, that you’re that there to show your body or face, appearance… You’re there cause you like to play music, and that’s it.”
Of Backbones and Creators
Remi’s and Jarkko’s on-stage main job is providing the rhythm frame for all to find orientation and thus play correctly, as well as harmonize together, or as Tuomo Latvala (Omnium Gatherum) once said “I am the computer”. Off stage Jarkko is BRHG’s manager and acting as mediator i.e. in discussions of arrangements. His dayjob background in trainings might come in very handy here. “If you wanna be good, a good musician and a good fellow in the band you need to listen”, says Rainer. It is about what serves the music and the band dynamics, which sometimes requires dropping his ego and his solos. This learning to listen to the needs of the music was an important part of Remi’s musical education, too. Although only Remi names it, at the very least he and Rainer are a bit nerdy when it comes to drumming. Rainer fills the simplicity of New Wave of Punk at Grave Pleasures with “more subtle things going on you know underneath the surface so to speak”. He prefers if “not everything is as it sounds”. He proved it with what they just delivered on stage minutes before we spoke! Making Doom drumming groovy seems no less nerdy.
Commitment or Bounty Hunting?
So, as many drummers must play in many bands – more on average than any other instrumentalist – does it mean they are good socialisers? Luana replies: “I played in two bands in the past, Apophizys and Nervosa, so I believe I can handle it very well if we’re just talking about socialize.” As always, Remi has a many-layered, analysis-based opinion. On the one hand, drummers can hardly take out their instrument to a party and initialize a sing-along of all, as perhaps a guitarist could. On the other hand there are simply less drummers and even fewer good drummers. Thus each good drummer is more valuable and wanted. Jarkko even speaks of “bounty hunters”, coming to play their shows and migrating from band to band which is quite the opposite of himself: he co-founded his main band (in 2005). The teenagers learned their instruments sort of together, managed all the transitions from adolescence to adulthood as individuals and as a band, and nowadays are even living in different countries. Then again, affiliations with several bands are no obstacle as such to Jarkko or to Remi. To him, success is not predictable so playing in several bands rarely results in competing interests. So this is no reason to question loyalties. Rainer’s vita gives a vivid example of how things can happen. He is a master at drums, a social person, careful observer, good listener with an integrative personality. His proficient reputation opened doors, resulting in him taking chances or getting fired (not even knowing why). Yet he is deeply rooted in Causemos, which to him is a band of honest and fair interaction, no creative limits and full independence. The first gets us back to one of their key motivations: it is about the music and doing it together!
A Half-Dead Sloth and The Metamorphosis Of A Panda Bear
I asked each of them to match their own character with animals representing another expression of an attribute. “Honestly, I’m a half-dead sloth, I just move if I really need too”, Luana says about her energetics, adding: “My generation is a bit like this, if I can use this as an excuse.” There is no need to excuse for being highly efficient, right? But the pressure of self-optimization has certainly grown in the last decade and it urges one to prioritize much more. Funny enough, Remi sees the buffalo in his energetics: moving when he has a reason to do so and then it becomes difficult to stop him.
‘Merekat’ Rainer and ‘sloth’ Jarkko have both undergone a metamorphosis. Jarkko learned from wasting his energy and Rainer’s metamorphosis went both ways. He says he has been a panda bear: “I have been holding my behaviour like for ever.” But he was super energetic when he was “innocent and unbroken”, then all shy and silent, but now the “outgoing, super talkative, energetic – merekat!”
As Jarkko stated earlier, he prefers to think and act strategically, thus matching his type of smartness with that of the cunning fox appears natural. Remi’s love of collaboration with like-minded persons in creative matters resembles the sheep in my question. It represents minds that work best in the comfort of a flock of like-minded souls. Luana and Rainer benefit from observing and associate themselves with the intelligence of the owl.
The Polar Bear – A People Person?!
The polar bear spends 99 % of his adult time in solitude, which is as marginal as can be, right? Yet, “people person” Rainer considers himself a polar bear, as Luana does. It fits them both, I tend to say. Luana seems an emotional person with strong opinions: “if I can stay alone, not talk and do my stuff, it’s better.” It seems she learned to remain silent when actually she would rather shout out loud, perhaps it may happen when she is bullied again. Silence and solitude seem more efficient and thus fit her as owl and sloth. Rainer’s anxious personality kept him on the margins of social life, at least for most of his childhood. Anxiety taught ‘owl’ Rainer to read faces very carefully. Drumming paved his road to self-recognition, and further on into sovereign social interaction which is essential, especially as a session musician.
Jarkko and Remi like group interactions when it allows them the time they need on their own as well. As such, they go with the wolf for my question. The pack of wolves is a family-like, structured smaller group of individuals living and working for the benefit of all together. Remi and Jarkko underlined the weight of their band ‘pack’ for their comfort zone. Hamferð speak of themselves as a bunch of nerds and touring with them for Remi is a bit like being home. All members of BRHG do meet in person, only rarely these days. But Jarkko supposes that this has added to the band dynamics by strengthening the focus and naturally it’s now even more special to meet up.
From Gear to Groove
Of Battle Towers and Second Hand DIY Kits
Jarkko’s style and attitude make him a natural pro at playing a kit with a rack. Although showcase matters to Rainer, and his kit has to match the band’s sort of corporate design and soundscapes. So he plays a minimalistic, DIY, second-hand kit as well as a fully-equipped-Nigel-Glockler-standard battle towers.
Rainer’s Grave Pleasures drum kit is special: “The amount of pieces is like really small; it’s like four: two toms, one snare and one bass drum.” While this is no more than the absolute basics, “the drums itself are quite big. There is a big bass drum and huge snare drum.”
This drum kit, it comes with a history, it is custom-made in perhaps not too common sense. “I made it not from the ground up but I was buying shells and rims and everything like separately and putting the pieces together”, he explains. “I mean the drums sound like really, really dry. Dry and low tuned – that’s basically what we need.” So he searched for “broken, or left barren or abandoned, like old school drums or music classes or someone bought a drum kit to their trial and was playing for a week or two and it’s like off.” Rainer who lives and breathes marginality in this regard, and he adores craftsmanship. “I was hunting for those drum kits. And yeah, I love that. It’s my old sound. It looks like me. It sounds like me. It’s really cool.” His passion for DIY with drums does not end here. Not at all. “I have a genuine interest in doing theat kind of stuff, you know, like the Grave Pleasures drum kit. And I also made this suitcase drumkit. I love building the silliest stuff like my snareBQ or snarrreBQ. I have a snare drum and I made a grill out of that, yes!”
“I have a pretty basic drum kit, but I like everything to be very right”, says Luana who must stretch at times to reach where she wants to hit. Pragmatic Remi has a little crush on that one cymbal, you will never find that in his Hamferð drum kit but perhaps one day you will run into it in his private vault … ahm … rehearsal space, of course. This pragmatism and smaller kits might not rule the show visually but become handy on tours with shorter set up times and less weight and volume to be moved.