Freak When Spoken To

by Anastasia Jonsen

  Smacking in overtones? Linus Abrahamson explains this unusual practice by using “Hateful Little People” as an example.

  “The instrumental section, along with the solo, is in 13/16 and based around a riff played with natural harmonics on the guitar, which is something IA uses extensively in his playing, especially during solos. So much that he regularly receives e-mails where people ask which whammy pedal he uses, despite the fact that he never uses one at all. The intro riff is also played with natural harmonics. The harmonics themselves are nothing weird, they’ve been used a lot in both classical and rock guitar music, but the way IA performs them is slightly unorthodox. Because IA doesn’t like the sound of the pick hitting the string when playing a natural harmonic, he uses the last joint of his middle finger on the left hand to ‘smack’ the string at the position where the natural harmonic is located. To ease this process, he lowers the pitch of the string with the tremolo bar (sometimes called vibrato bar or whammy bar), using his right hand, before actually smacking the string and then raising the bar back up to pitch. A similar ‘smacking’ technique was also used by Dimebag Darrell from Pantera, but he used to turn the vibrato bar 180 degrees (so it pointed away from the lower part of the guitar, instead of pointing at the neck) before raising the pitch to an even higher note than the actual harmonic.”

  IA himself has said that he’s slightly bewildered by the fact that people put so much focus on his solo playing, as he does so many other things as well. For instance, the solo parts in Freak Kitchen’s songs are much, much shorter than what you’d expect from a band which is considered a “guitar connoisseur” kind of band. Linus continues:

  “In ‘The Wrong Year’ there is an unusually long solo, almost a full minute. IA also mostly improvises his solos, but there are some exceptions. The guitar solo in ‘Haw, Haw, Haw’ is one of few in the Freak Kitchen repertoire that is actually composed rather than improvised, and it’s overdubbed with a keyboard. IA also provided a guitar transcription of the solo for the Swedish guitar magazine Fuzz.”

  Because IA improvises the solos, the live versions may differ a lot from the way they were played on the album. Björn has expressed a wish that IA ought to learn some of his solos and play them like they were played originally, as “they are small compositions in their own right and belong in the song”. He is also quick to point out something people sometimes forget: IA’s rhythm guitar playing.

  “I’m very lucky, because I play with the world’s greatest rhythm guitarist. Sure, IA is a true magician when it comes to the quirky solo stuff, but his rhythm playing is the best. I’ve played with other guitarists along the way, and after you’ve got used to IA’s level, you tend to notice other guitarists’ pretty awful rhythm playing.”

  During the near decade in between Organic (2005) and Cooking with Pagans (2014), Freak Kitchen only released one album, Land of the Freaks (2009). However, IA wasn’t sitting idly at home. He released two solo albums and two albums with Jonas Hellborg’s project Art Metal, but he also did a large number of guest appearances. The task of compiling a complete list of what IA has done over the years would be immense, and not even IA recalls all the instances. Many of them can be found on freakguitar.com, but the list is not exhaustive. When you’re such a sought after collaborator, how on earth do you come up with something worthwhile to contribute with after having had your finger in so many pies?

  “There have been times when I’ve been in the studio with a band to play a guest solo and I’ve been honest and said that their song needed something odd or conspicuous because it’s a bit lame. But people tend to get a bit uneasy if I don’t deliver exactly what they expected, so I try to find the golden mean where I do something interesting and fresh, but in the way they want it.”

  The reasons popular musicians do guest appearances vary. Sometimes it’s seen as a way of self-promotion, or because you’re half expecting a favour in return. To IA it’s simpler than that.

  “I play on other people’s albums because they ask nicely or repeatedly. Some bands ask because they need a name, others are already well-known. Unfortunately it’s rare that it’s a case of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’. And I have never charged any money for a guest appearance either. There have been a few cases where the artist or label has offered me money, which has been a welcome change, but in a majority of times, I’ve done it for free. I have no idea how many albums and songs I’ve played on. But I’ve cut down a lot on guest appearances, because I don’t want to make people frustrated or disappointed because I can’t deliver a solo exactly when they want me to.”

  On a few occasions, IA’s contributions have been subtle or gone almost unnoticed because the band has been completely unknown, but in 2012, he guested Germany’s Panzerballett with the song “The IKEA Trauma”. IA provided vocals and a guitar solo and really made a splash. They also made a memorable video for it, shot by the Freak Kitchen regular Anders Bryngel. As IA wrote the lyrics for the song, it’s in his direction you should point if you find the rhyme “where is my mommy” and “suck on my tummy” confusing. It seems as if IA has completely missed the fact that tummy isn’t slang for ‘thumb’, but ‘stomach’. Well, at least it makes for an interesting mental image!

  But IA isn’t the only one who has helped friends out, done favours or simply been hired to provide expert musicianship. In the year 2000, Björn played session drums for a Greek punk band called Isodos, on the album Είσοδος κινδύνου (which means ‘Emergency Entrance’ and is probably a word play on the phrase emergency exit). In 2002, he played on the album We Will Rise, the debut by Stefan Elmgren’s Full Strike. Elmgren was mostly known from Gothenburg heavy metal champions Hammerfall, and the album sounds pretty much exactly like his then main band. Björn got to play some fun double bass drums on songs like “Created Fantasy” and “Metal Mind”.

  Prior to joining Freak Kitchen, Björn played on albums for instance by The Spotnicks (Live 1999) and the Swedish artist Môra-Per (Minnesmärken). He also joined his old MI pal, keyboard player Peter Wenk (who also played in Amatis for a while) on an album by Johan Nilson, Ear Sick. Agostino Menella, whose job Björn took over in Amatis, also plays on that particular rarity released in 1994. An album which both IA and Björn play on is Come What Might by Petrus (IA’s good friend Niklas Andersson, mentioned earlier) and it was released in 2005.

  As we’ve seen in the case of IA and the passive aggressive bureaucrats at EMI, record companies sometimes tend to have opinions about what their artists do. Torben Schmidt, Freak Kitchen’s label manager, was, in fact, the one who suffered from this decision by EMI, and this has affected his attitude towards artists’ freedom. Torben is very clear about this: IA, Björn and Christer decide for themselves if they want to play on somebody’s record. But even if Torben gives them free hands, other contracts may mean other things, and IA says that it’s a jungle.

  “Already with the incident with EMI, I learned that I have to contact solicitors specializing in the entertainment industry in order to know what it means to write my name on any kind of dotted line. What does it mean practically and financially, no really, in Swedish kronor, what does it mean? Will my hands be tied from doing anything else if I say yes to this side project? I try to act like Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker: you’re a part of the music industry, but only by opening the iron gates once in a while. The music industry doesn’t own you – you make occasional visits when it suits you. We don’t go to fancy music industry parties or premiers. It’s so easy to get caught up in the game, but I don’t want a blinking record company logo tattooed on my forehead. The record company and the manager are meant to work for you, so my advice to young bands is always that they should do things themselves for as long as they can. You get a bigger piece of the cake and you learn more things along the way of you don’t have a babysitter.”

  While working on Land of the Freaks, Freak Kitchen did a few unexpected collaborations. During the Swedish Linköping Jazz & Blu
es Festival in March, 2009, Freak Kitchen and the Linköping Jazz Orchestra played a variety of Freak Kitchen tunes together. The year before that, IA had shown his skills in the world of classical music.

  “I have many bad traits, but one of the good ones is that I’m good at finishing what I’ve started. I practised for eight months for Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in Västerås, which was a one-off thing. But I did it and it feels good knowing that I could do it. It featured Patrik Jablonski on piano, Jonas Hellborg on bass and me on guitar, together with the Västerås Sinfonietta, conducted by Hans Ek.”

  This was also when IA played an Apple Horn guitar with True Temperament for the first time, and his friend Mathias Walin sneakily filmed him trying it out. The clip is available on YouTube, and you can really see that IA is astounded by what True Temperament does for your playing. Linus describes what this mysterious creation is.

  “They are adjusted frets, invented by Anders Thidell. Normally, the frets on the neck of the guitar are straight, but that means that there is a compromise, where certain notes are actually ever so slightly out of tune, and that’s something everybody had to live with during the hundreds of years we’ve had the modern guitar. But the inventors of True Temperament have calculated where the notes are in perfect pitch, and adjusted the frets accordingly, which means that in places, the frets are slightly bent, or wavy. True Temperament gives IA the possibility to play chords anywhere on the neck and it’ll always be in perfect pitch. But even if you use True Temperament, you’ll often get a very slightly out of tune note depending on how hard you strike the string, and IA plays fairly aggressively, especially when he plays the rhythm guitar. That combined with his use of a thick guitar pick means that you’ll still have a margin where the note is not perfect. What True Temperament does is to help you avoid the worst cases of off-pitch, especially with regards to the guitar itself.”

  Towards the end of 2012, IA performed in another non-rock setting when he played live with his sister Karin and her choir La Cappella and nephew Andreas in a medieval church in Uppsala, Sweden. They played Christmas music, but also the more accessible tunes from the Freak Guitar albums.

  In 2013 came the latest Freak Guitar effort, The Smorgasbord. This was by no means an easier album to digest than the previous two, as it was a double CD, filled with brilliant and insane music. Janne Stark talks about IA’s solo adventures.

  “Freak Guitar aren’t very accessible albums, but enormously interesting and challenging. They really make you wonder what goes on in that brain of his. You discover something new every time you listen to them. And to make up an interesting balance, he includes really simple, but interesting cover songs which make you smile.”

  By now, the paths of Freak Kitchen and Freak Guitar were clearly separated. But what are the distinctions and similarities? Linus has analysed IA’s different sides.

  “Firstly, on the Freak Guitar albums, he programs and plays the drums himself and doesn’t have to compromise. It seems as if he lets the drums play along with the odd or complex patterns to a greater extent. I’m not going to say that it’s better or not, but it’s different. Really complex patterns are much more frequent in his solo work than in Freak Kitchen. Why that is, I don’t know. Perhaps he doesn’t want to put people in general through all that complexity, but saves it for the real nerds. It seems as if there are more guitarists who listen to Freak Guitar, but more of a mixed audience with Freak Kitchen.”

  IA himself sees an album like The Smorgasbord as a long time project.

  “The Freak Guitar albums work in a different way from Freak Kitchen. When we release a new Freak Kitchen album, there’s a flurry of activity, interviews-videos-tours, but a Freak Guitar release has years of shelf life. I’ll continue to do videos for tracks whenever I feel I’ve got material which suits a particular track. I’m shooting some clips in the forest right now and I’m working on a video for ‘Crossing the Rubicon’. I can do what I want to do, and that’s the major benefit of being your own boss. It has generated quite a bit of money through iTunes. When I look back on it now, I wonder if I’m quite right in the head. It’s one hefty mother of an album. I’m such a handful!”

  At the time, IA tried to work on both The Smorgasbord and the Cooking with Pagans albums simultaneously, but failed. He had to concentrate on The Smorgasbord, as it was first in line for release. In June, 2012, he mastered the album with Thomas Plec Johansson in Panic Room. It was released in March, 2013, on Thunderstruck Productions and Favored Nations – in physical format, which is normally reserved for Steve Vai’s own solo albums.

  And if we’re about talking music which demands something of the listener, what better example is there but Jonas Hellborg’s project Art Metal? In March, 2007, IA wrote extensively about the recording of Vyakhyan-Kar on his blog:

  “After many twists and turns by Jonas and yours truly regarding what Art Metal really is and should sound like, we’re about to wrap up the work on the album in the very near future. The reason this release has taken such a long time to complete is that it has mutated into different shapes and forms along the way. Initially I laid down my guitar parts to the wonderful, wonderful South Indian kanjira structures and rhythms by Selvaganesh. Jonas added some bass and it was great, but not exactly what we wanted it to be. Not Art Metal, which is a slippery thing to define. Then Anders Johansson recorded a full drum-kit over it all and suddenly several of the guitar parts felt a little too…don’t know…wrong? Now, we’ve taken away lots of the old takes and I’ve squeezed in more dirty stuff I felt was appropriate. Raw and noisy. Fast and to the point.”

  Apart from the musicians mentioned, the band also featured Jens Johansson on keyboards. (Yes, it’s the famous Johansson brothers from Yngwie Malmsteen’s Rising Force.) In 2014, The Jazz Raj was released, and Hellborg had then gone back to his tried and tested trio format, with IA on guitars and Ranjit Barot on drums. The album has been described as consisting of “two half-hour extended compositions with sections inter-related thematically using Western interpretation of Indian Ragas. It is a genre defying work; it is Jazz Metal and Indian music but primarily music for the pleasure of listening.”

  Deep stuff, man! Jonas Hellborg has played with so many extraordinary musicians in his life, and he is widely regarded as a complete genius in the bass playing world. You can safely assume that it takes a lot to impress him. But how did they meet?

  “I played at a mini festival arranged by the bass amp company EBS, and Freak Kitchen played there too. I liked what I heard and we hung out afterwards. IA approached me and told me he had seen me play with Anders and Jens Johansson somewhere back in pre-historic times. We continued to talk about musical interests we shared and one thing led to another and we started making music together. It wasn’t like I heard IA and thought, wow, I want to play with him! It was more the case that we synced on a personal level and started making music after that. I think that if you’re in sync on a personal level, you’re much more likely to go together well musically as well. The music you make is an expression of your experiences as a human being, and if two people understand where the other is coming from, you understand each other musically. I could talk about music theory and technical things, but that’s not really relevant: the foundation is personal chemistry.”

  If music is more than the actual playing, but also exchanges on a personal level, what has Jonas learned from IA and the other way around?

  “It’s very difficult to say. I couldn’t say what I got from whom or where or when. It’s all quite blurred. I suppose we have a connection because we’re both musicians who work internationally, and we both have a reputation as musical virtuosos, which means we understand each other. When we interact musically, we also learn things from each other on other levels. What I get out of playing with IA that I don’t get from other projects is so hard to define. The fact that I’m still making music with him is proof enough that something is worth it. I would never do anything just for commercial success. Perhaps one re
ason is that IA is one of the few people who understand all my very varying influences. I can discuss music on a very complex level and he understands it.”

  The musicians in the Art Metal project all take up a lot of space. How do you manage it so it doesn’t become a show-off chaos?

  “They might have the capacity to show off, but in Art Metal, everyone is very aware of when and how to claim space. Take for instance the Swedes who have played in Art Metal: myself, IA, Jens and Anders, we’re all very keen on exploring new ground. Our aim is not to show off, but to make musical discoveries. Our approach is perhaps more of the artist’s, we want to examine and explore music. I’m not playing with Yngwie Malmsteen, you know?”

  Hellborg and IA are both very busy people. Thanks to technology with digital recordings and fast Internet connections, it is possible to be active in a project without meeting physically.

  “We send sound files back and forth. I find this process very interesting in itself. IA gets very frustrated when things change too many times. He’s very much about getting a good end result and I’m more about learning about music, the process, reactions – the journey. But we meet in the flesh surprisingly often, because we tend to run into each other all the time. I have family in Gothenburg and we frequent the same musicians’ shows and conventions such as NAMM in Los Angeles and the Frankfurt Musikmesse and we’ve met up during tours when we just happen to play the same cities at the same time.”

  IA calls Hellborg a “problematic and wonderful chap”.

  “I think Jonas has very few people he can talk to regarding his Swedish heritage. His mother was a theatre star. I’ve learned a lot from him, but not necessarily music. He’s taught me about how to let go. Once, in India, someone filmed us from underneath, and I was sweaty and had triple chins, and it looked hideously unflattering and I was muttering about it. Jonas just said: ‘But that’s you too, just as much as you’re you from above with perfect lighting. And you play like shit sometimes, too. And perfect takes other times. It’s all you.’ When he gets on stage in front of four thousand Mexicans and just stands there and tunes his bass for ten minutes, he drives me crazy. Perhaps you’d think someone like that is full of himself, but if you give him some sound advice, he’ll listen, and he’s not a delicate flower about his gear either. My son Gabriel ripped a few strings from Jonas’ super-expensive bass, and he didn’t even mind. I don’t think anyone has made me so angry and frustrated, because he keeps changing things, but I don’t think anyone has showed me so many new things and introduced me to so many magnificent artists. He knows more about life than most people, and he was the one who introduced me to India.”