Villebråd - "S/t" demo/mini-cd (2005)
 
 
Recording log, written by Påhl
 
When we first perceived the project that was to become Villebråd back in 2001, me and Erik had no clue what we were doing. At the time, both of us had a death metal project going, but we often talked (and argued fiercely) about how to progress within the genre where we had chose to function for the last few years. We felt that somehow we couldn't do anything exciting with the material that we were writing, and certainly none of us wanted to play "experimental" or "progressive" metal. In those days, I was totally into prog rock like Camel or Kaipa and tried hard to get the somewhat reluctant Erik to get along with me. Erik, on the other hand, was becoming increasingly engulfed with his passion for electronic music and hip hop. Basically, we were in a limbo, not knowing what kind of music we wanted to play or what to do with our lives at all. Some nights, I fooled around in the rehearsal room with a couple of totally flipped out riffs (with the overdrive level at the top, of course) backed up by Erik's insane double bass drumming. I thought that maybe it sounded a little bit like Camel at times, but when we invited David Hallberg (who was a confirmed prog-head and a good friend to us at the time) to listen to our ideas and maybe join in, he was totally bewildered. Diplomatical as he is, he approved some of the stuff we were doing, but he probably thought that we had just lost our minds. We tried to record a demo tape with these songs, but it all fizzled out into nothing and we didn't mourn its passing too much.
 
Three years later, Erik started studying in Visby on the island of Gotland outside the east coast of Sweden. I myself was living in the archipelago on the south-east coast, so it was not very easy for us to get together at all. We spoke over the phone a couple of times and the idea of resurrecting Villebråd came up. Erik had been offered to use a recording studio located near his school at nights, and we thought that this might be a good opportunity to finally get something on tape. I made the trip to Visby, but when I got there we realized we hadn't really discussed what was actually going to be recorded. What happened next was a complete breath of fresh air and probably is the reason why we are still happily playing with this band: Erik put on Stone Gon' by Barry White. Instead of arguing about this and that genre being incorporated into our sound, the understanding that music can be fantastic regardless of your various preconceptions opened up such an enormous door to our creativity that all of the songwriting for the "S/t"-cd went incredibly smooth. Sure, a lot of the stuff on that CD suffers from a possibly vain desire to sound like all of our influences thrown together, but for the first time we understood what we wanted to do with our music - be completely free to explore whatever we felt like.
 
The actual studio was located at the upper floor of a deserted warehouse in the centre of Visby, and the place was quite creepy, especially since - as I mentioned before - we only could record at night. The sessions usually started around nine o'clock and ended each morning by the time we collapsed by fatigue and weariness. We rehearsed each tune a couple of times and then went directly into the recording room to nail it down - without caring very much if we had written actual songs or just bits and pieces stitched together. It was great fun, but when looking back we would probably have made it a lot different... 
 
One late night, Erik called up a friend of his from school, Mikael Hedberg. Mikael is a skilled pianist and we thought that maybe he could do a couple of moog solos or something, but when he showed up we started jamming blues instead, just laughing our heads off. That is how the song Räkna till tre så försinner allt came to be. Mikael played some sad chords and I tried to play a solo like I thought David Gilmour would have done it, and that was it. We kept the whole improvised take with flaws and all. That was one of those golden moments when we acted on impulse only, not even caring if anyone would like it in the end. The same way of thinking made Erik drag out his old violin for the outro on the song Röd Gryning. The song ends with something like three layers of sampled mellotron-choir accompanied by both electric and acoustic guitar and a violin solo. We thought it sounded like something that Manowar could have done, so we were joking a lot about it. Although we were somehow quite serious about the dismal qualities of the music, we also had a lot of fun with the graveness of it all. And I'm not just saying this to cover up the fact that we are pretentious assholes.
 
However, the thing that I remember the most from this little adventure is what happened after we had finished the recording. On the morning of the last session, when we had just completed the vocals, we mixed down temporary versions of the songs so that we could savour it at home. When listening to it, we took down notes of what to change when Erik was to do the final mix the following night. I returned to the mainland, and was sitting on the train home when Erik called me up and told me that there had been a break-in at the studio. Someone had bashed in the door and stole some equipment, including the computer where we had the recording. Since it was we who had been to the studio prior to the break-in, Erik had to submit to a police hearing. Sadly, we hadn't stole the recording gear - because if we had, we would have had a chance to mix the CD properly! The only thing left to do was to try and use an equalizer to cut some frequencies and to boost others, which was hard since we didn't really know how to do any of it. So when cutting the cymbals (they were REALLY loud on the pre-mix), for example, we also had to cut away other similar frequencies on the vocals and guitars. But looking on the bright side - the mixing of this record was quick and easy indeed!