Way back in very early 2000’s Jimbo asked me if I wanted to form a fusion band. Why not! He had a guitarist (Teemu) and a keyboard player (Jyri) stashed away in a closet and off we went. I dropped some tunes from my sleeve and we started honing them.
Pretty soon it became apparent that Jyri was not a match for the project so he got swapped for a CD player; shame, a nice guy and better company than a Sony, but such is life. So I prerecorded the keys at home and we were confined to playing to click and prearranged song forms — nothing new after Oktoplus though.
For a few years we practiced in the old Huso school. During that time we needed a name for some important forgotten purpose so we became Intergalactic Huso Orchestra, also known as IHO among friends.
Around mid-00’s we decided it is time to record our tunes and went to the Valtone studio [RIP] in Turku aiming to get Jimbo’s drums tracked and possibly some guitar and bass too. The drums stuck to virtual tape down quite OK but not that much of the bass and guitar was really usable so we decided to continue with those tracks later at home. We also stopped rehearsals to find the time to be able to finish the album. Well, life gets in the way and there is a limited time to do anything, so things did not progress too quickly, and especially Teemu did not get much of the guitars done after the initial efforts.
Fast forward some ten years of slow motion, and eventually things had ended with me playing a lot of the guitars as well as the keyboards and the bass. We also got some guesting guitar players to lend their talents to the sound of the album. Somewhere at this point Teemu’s diminished role kind of transferred him from the band personnel list to the guest list as well .
Now, in 2018, the album is finally recorded, mixed, mastered, cover-arted and ready to be released. Oh yeah, and this web site also had to be whipped up. A slow journey but intergalactic travel just takes time until the day we invert warp-speed.
Time to start planning for the second album…
…Oh wait… some hiccups in the mastering process… and the evermoving target seems to be moving to early 2019. But what’s another year…
– Jari
Post Scriptum
Album finally released on May 1st 2019. Yay!