Freak When Spoken To

by Anastasia Jonsen

  When it was time to record an album with the new line-up, IA had had the time and money to get his own small Apple Horn Abusement studio up and running. (Abusement is of course a play on the words “abuse” and “amusement”, but possibly also “basement”, as IA’s original studio was situated on the lower ground floor of the Eklundh family house.)

  One benefit of having your own studio is that the band doesn’t have to record demos, as these are chiefly made to get a preliminary version of a finished song. This practice is not necessary if you don’t have to work under the same expensive time restrictions as in other studios. This is good for band finances, but bad for fans who won’t get another Junk Tooth. This curiously named collection of demos from Spanking Hour and the third album was available for free from the band’s website for a while around the turn of the millennium. IA says he can’t quite remember why they chose to release Junk Tooth.

  “The demos were recorded in a studio in Partille and in our rehearsal room. I think we basically wanted to engage our fans. We had a competition where they could draw suggestions for the cover. The fans could then download the winning cover as well as the songs in mp3 format. It was never released in physical format.”

  On metal-archives.com, one reviewer concludes that some of their funniest lyrics are found here, especially to the track “I’m Not Going”: “He just improvises his way through the song with a lot of gibberish and sometimes he even uses some Swedish words and phrases. Oh, this really shows you how raw and wonderful music can be.”

  On Move, the drums were recorded in Crocodile Inn, in Kolding, Denmark, and from this album on, Freak Kitchen only record the drum tracks and do the mixing and mastering in other studios. But IA is more than happy to spend time in his own studio instead of rushing through the process away from home.

  “Sure, the studio environment is cool, you’re cut off from the world and the hours pass so quickly. But I think music should be recorded with joy and the right timing, and that’s not always possible in someone else’s studio. By having my own studio, I can spend a lot more time on the recording process. If I need to work on the lyrics, I take a walk with the dogs; if my voice is out of shape, I’ll sing the next day instead. On the other hand, you risk overdoing it. Then you just have to be cruel to yourself to be kind to your listeners: mute a few channels and kill your darlings, because no one will understand what the hell all that extra stuff was meant to do for the song anyway. But that can be completely heart-breaking, because you may have spent insane amounts of time on it.”

  Björn on the other hand feels right at home in the studio environment and has a relaxed attitude to recording. He says that it suits him, because he’s always had an easy time recording.

  “Recording with click tracks has been a walk in the park for me, but I know others find it difficult. I’ve always had great fun in the studio, especially as I’ve got a certain Mattias Eklundh; that makes it so much easier. A lot happens at the beginning of a recording, when IA and I are together alone in the studio. We work very fast, and we seem to have some sort of twin brain, a very special connection. We aren’t normally pressed for time, but we work incredibly fast anyway. We hardly even speak in the studio, we just know. And it’s not that I have everything ready when we enter the studio, far from it, but it’s a very special feeling to be allowed to find the flow. Sometimes I listen to our old recordings and I don’t even remember things I did because we worked so fast.”

  Although Freak Kitchen don’t record demos anymore, Björn still gets some idea of the song structure in advance and can prepare his parts according to what IA plays on rhythm guitar.

  “I get a CD-R of raw guitar tracks and I listen to the songs closely on my own until I feel I’m ready to enter the drum room and work on finding what each song needs. It doesn’t take long, perhaps a few days, and I very rarely write anything down. One example where I did write something down was in ‘Teargas Jazz’, where I wrote a very complicated orchestration. Normally it’s all in my head. When we write songs, IA gives me complete freedom. There’s perhaps one fill per album he demands be there, and it’s always something really silly: something I’d never ever put there myself. We always record very quickly. IA will say ‘let’s try that again’ once in a while, but he’s almost a bit too loyal.”

  There are pros and cons of no rehearsals and very little time in the recording booth. But Björn claims that he never wishes he’d done things differently when he listens to older recordings.

  “No, I think it’s awesome. Seriously, why would I want to change anything? If I want to do something differently, I’ll do it live. Of course, you can always fiddle around and optimize and add details, but I’m much more of a band guy than a solo player: I aim for what works for the song as a whole. And because we hardly ever rehearse before a recording and work so quickly in the studio, I never have time to get emotionally attached to the stuff I play.”

  Björn says he never limits himself out of fear that he won’t be able to pull it off live and that the thought has never even crossed his mind.

  “I wouldn’t overdub things or rely on a computer; I’m so basic and analogue. Sure, you have to remember that you may have to copy yourself sometime in the future, because you want to add a song to the live set, but this far it’s never been a problem. But we have songs I’ve never played from beginning to end, ever. Sometimes you patch things up in the studio, or sometimes you have two takes and choose one which has the best groove, but perhaps one dull fill, and then you go back and replace that with something better. But everything you hear on the album was played the way you hear it. We don’t cut and paste or reuse things.”

  However, Björn mentions the end of “The Rights to You” as one example where he did want to try overdubbing. He played on some hard cases just to get a particular sound, which was then overdubbed with a few other sounds. He says that they were aware that it wouldn’t be possible to recreate live. Christer has a similar attitude to authenticity.

  “Everything I do must be for real. I thrashed IA’s studio speakers because I needed to listen fucking loud. Even if we’re recording really weird stuff, I have to really feel the force of the music, I need to hear it thundering inside.”

  Freak Guitar Camp

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1999, IA tried out a new idea. He had been holding guitar clinics (a combination of a lecture, spontaneous stand-up comedy and practical examples) regularly for many years, but what about intensifying it a little? It could work! He named it Freak Guitar Week and it was held in a school which was closed for the summer holidays.

  The idea proved successful, and it got IA thinking. Sweden has a long tradition of sending city kids to the countryside during the summer, so what about gathering more enthusiastic guitar students in the woods for six days and stuffing them full of food and quirky guitar playing? Freak Guitar Camp was born and became a thundering success. Location changed to a residential study centre in the middle of nowhere – or as specific as it gets: Härsjösand, surrounded by miles and miles of trees and lakes, about half an hour’s drive from Gothenburg.

  IA admits that the two camp weeks are the highlight of his year.In 2015, he held his 17th camp, and over a thousand guitarists from all over the world have attended so far. A large number of campers have returned several years, which makes the total number of filled seats even greater.

  But what makes the camp so in demand? For six days, a group of eager students are immersed in odd time signatures, polyrhythm techniques, unorthodox scales, tips about song writing and how to make it in the world of music. If it sounds intense, it’s because it is. In fact, IA says that if anybody leaves, thinking “yup, nailed it!”, he’s not done his job properly. There is no way a camper can take in and process all the material they work with during the week, and that’s IA’s intention: he wants to sow a seed which will grow during the rest of the year. And apparently, this approach works, because it seems impossible to find campers who didn’t enjoy their week in the woods with
IA.

  One such camper is Linus “Mr. Gul” Abrahamson, who as an eager 18-year-old attended the very first Freak Guitar Camp in 2000 and for several consecutive years. He started as an attender, but would come to play a much larger part in IA’s life in the area of music theory.

  “What I do for IA is to transcribe his music, mostly for his annual Freak Guitar Camp where the campers get a fairly thick booklet with notation and tablature for all the material they’re about to learn. IA does know how to transcribe music, but he hasn’t had any formal education, so some of the stuff he transcribes isn’t always the common way to write it – although it may be theoretically correct. Also, the more high-end notation software tends to be quite difficult to master, and it’s sometimes tricky to make it look really good while simultaneously being efficiently transcribed or written. You can think of it as Photoshop for notation – you can do pretty much anything, but it ain’t always a walk in the park and there are plenty of rules to follow.”

  IA is quick to give credit to Linus, and has mentioned him both in blogs and interviews.

  “Time is my constant enemy. Before Linus started doing the notation, I used to isolate myself somewhere for two weeks in order to get the Freak Guitar Camp material transcribed – now he comes to my studio and it’s all done in two days. He’s beyond gifted and makes it all look so neat and accessible.”

  Linus had come to know IA’s style very well during several camps, and the collaboration began when Linus approached IA.

  “When I looked at IA’s transcriptions I thought, ‘I certainly can’t play like him, but I can definitely make these transcriptions look better!’ So I re-transcribed the whole booklet, adapted the notation and compressed the layout so that his 100-page original became a 30-page version and I sent it to him. He liked the way it looked and we began co-operating. We used to joke about it being only for the sake of saving trees.”

  Like with any long-going activity, there are now a bunch of people who proudly call themselves veterans, and one of them is Demian Andersen. He’s the bass player of the fusion band Zebeck, and the vocalist and guitarist of the metal band Silence Reversed. He’s a civil engineer, but has also worked as a music teacher for twelve years. In some ways, he was the perfect poster child for the camp: young, enthusiastic, talented, devoted to music – but wanted more.

  “A year or so into the new millennium, I got my hands on a couple of Freak Kitchen albums. For the first time in my life, I’d found a real musical idol in IA. A week later, he was going to do a clinic in Stockholm. I was going to see the man play his music, hear it, and analyse the shit out of it. I ended up sitting almost alone at the front, and I had two big notebooks. I’d even prepped them with tablature lines so I could write fast as fuck. Two demonstration songs into the clinic he just lost the plot, pointed at me and said something like ‘Stop writing things down! It’s freaking me out! Nothing I do here is that important!’ During the intermission he came up to me, made sure I hadn’t taken his outburst the wrong way. After that, he invited me to attend the Freak Guitar Camp and I went there regularly for many years.”

  When camp attenders talk about their experiences, it almost sounds a bit psychedelic, a hippie-like adventure in the middle of the forest, paradoxically blended with strict discipline. Demian talks about why it’s an experience out of the ordinary.

  “In the Swedish woods, no one can hear you scream! The Freak Guitar Camp is what happens when you gather 30-40 guitarists in a cabin in the woods. It’s a wonderful and insane experience. Sure, IA is the guy who puts it together, but what made the camp into what it is, are the campers: guitarists from all over the world who want to go someplace new, just as much physically as musically. In the good old days, you got up at 07.30, and sometimes lessons didn’t end until 02.00 in the morning. IA has let up a bit, and the schedule is slightly less terrifying now, and there’s a football tournament instead of a song-off on the sixth day.”

  For a couple of years, IA held these six-day-workshops three weeks in a row, but had to cut it down to two, because it got too intense even for him. However, he took the concept to India in 2014 and there are plans for a new camp there in 2016 as well as one in Japan, but he says that Sweden will always be “the mothership”. If there’s ever a reason to use the expression “going all in”, it’s when describing what IA does at the camp. Because of all the returning campers, he cannot rely on reusing old material, but writes new exercises every year. But it’s not only for the sake of the campers; IA uses this as an opportunity to really force himself to develop, both as a musician and as a teacher.

  You might also think that he’d utilize the music he writes for the camp in later material for Freak Kitchen or on the Freak Guitar albums, but it’s surprisingly rare. Linus Abrahamson explains that the music IA composes for the camp is written with a specific purpose: to create interesting exercises to what IA feels guitar players generally need to practice on, but rarely find in mainstream exercise books and videos. Linus identifies five Freak Kitchen songs to derive from exercises.

  “The main riffs in ‘Heal Me’ and ‘Teargas Jazz’, the latter in Indian tonality, are originally from Freak Guitar Camp songs. ‘Clean It Up’ used to be called ‘Pick It Up’ and IA used the main riff from it. The same goes for ‘Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan’, which bore the same name in its original shape. The main riff in ‘Ranks of the Terrified’, despite being a new song, originates from a 2000 Freak Guitar Camp song.”

  Another example of recycling is found in the instrumental song “Six Dildo Bob & the Bluegrass Samba from Hell”, where the main melody happens to be one of the melodic phrases from the guitar solo in “Are You for Real?” The middle section from “Six Dildo Bob” was later used as a main melody in “Evil Shower” from the first Freak Guitar album. The first phrase from the guitar solo in “Snap”, which was improvised, became a main theme in “Caffeine” from the second Freak Guitar album, because IA thought the phrase had good enough potential to stand on its own as a proper melody.

  But we’re not leaving the Swedish woods yet. The camp experience seems be as much about bonding or creating a network as it’s about learning IA’s quirky playing techniques. Demian describes what it’s like to live 24/7 with other guitar fanatics for a week.

  “Beyond getting to experience all of IA’s cool new ideas, I always liked meeting all these new people, sometimes with diametrically opposed views on how to play, how to make music, and even life. Unless you’re the grumpiest of grumps, you can’t come back from that without being inspired to think in new ways. And putting yourself out there, literally in the woods, in a place you’ve never been before makes you vulnerable. If you dare to take that step, it’s good, because it’s all about good fun and camaraderie. You will make friends for life.”

  Demian also says that he has learned many things he can use as a music teacher. He first met IA as he was starting his university studies.

  “I believe I had a lot more of a coddling approach to handling students then: handholding all the way. But then I was roughed up by the camp experience, and thought a lot about IA’s approach, which can be described as pointing towards a mountain top, filling your backpack with notation, and cheering you on. Most people hope to go the camp and turn into IA, but that can’t happen. But if you’re filled up with enough new ideas, you’ll become you. There are a lot of rules in music; theory and technique you can delve into. But in the end, it comes down to getting a individuals to express themselves. And by getting filled with ideas, you acquire a vocabulary to start expressing yourself. That is IA’s and the camp’s greatest strength. Because of all the exchanging of ideas, you always find new ways to express yourself, and that is what every teacher should hope to achieve. So, throw ideas at your students, see what sticks. Different things will stick with different people.”

  Björn Fryklund, whose regular day job is teaching drums, also tries different ways, and one of his most used methods is to ask the students “why did you play tha
t” and “why should you do this”.

  “I make them question everything. I train them to ask why. I don’t mean that they should necessarily doubt me, but inquire why we’re learning a particular thing. I always have a plan with my lessons and what I teach. So I try to make them think. Why is this what the song needs? Why do you even play fills? I remember when I went to MI, the teacher would say ‘just give the song what it needs’, and I would almost be panicking: What do you mean needs?! Just give me the rhythm and preferably in notation! And sometimes my students complain just like I did. But it’s an important part of pedagogy and an important preparation for life. Always ask why!”

  Another widely appreciated feature at the Freak Guitar Camp is the cuisine. A few years into the camp’s existence, IA decided that the food served should be vegetarian. But he needed a good chef who could mirror the camp’s high ambitions in their cooking. This person turned out to be yet another steady character in Freak Kitchen’s extended family, Fiffi Tjusling. Just like IA, she is self-taught and started a business out of enthusiasm and passion for what she does. With her ten-year-streak, she’s become a vital part of the Freak Guitar Camp. She first got in contact with IA because her son attended the camp. She and her small crew look after the campers, and for some of them, it’s perhaps extra important to have a kind of parental figure there. Some of the youngest attenders have never been abroad alone before. Freak Kitchen’s fans are a very diverse group and Fiffi describes the campers as a motley gang too.