Tuesday, November 19, 2002. Day of the Leonids.

Occured today have the end of one cycle and beginning of a new one. As the academic boghole widens and deepens, individuals must make new efforts to maintain their sanity. Surplus thoughts that litter the mind must be put out and rendered as music! Thus, creation of a new Portrait of Beyond record begins.

It is time to excavate yet deeper into the essence of existence and worlds Beyond. And it is time to find yet new terrains in musical expression.

How will the path begun with Universal Destiny, Journey and Obscure Passages be followed? Time will tell, no doubt, make no mistake. We shall see what surprises the newly begun cycle holds.

Again the range of collective ideas extends beyond the present day to the sources and ends of time and intelligence.

Resourcewise, things are looking good indeed for us: A practice room was found by a miraculous coincidence. Undercover agent has been sent to explore a new city. And we have been able to clone band-member J Soikkeli (there are now two of them producing wicked rhythms simultaneously)

December 2002

During the year's last month, a respectable number of band members convened many times in the new practicing facilities, attempting to reverse the polarity of old song making habits.

So difficult it is to fight against one's own will that no polarities could be reversed before the year had come to an end and the dark matter of two complete drum tracks had appeared along with some bass and rhythm guitar.

Make no mistake! There will be music and it will have the most interesting flavours.

Another look at polarities:

In April 2003, an innocent calculation allows us to make interesting remarks about the band's latest affairs: Nine months has passed since we had the clearest vision - a plan... to actually fully compose and play the songs for our next release before recording them.

Now time has passed, most band members live in the same city, and there is a practice room. Yet we end up recording drum tracks for new songs with no other outline than a quickly written draft of what pattern should come after the other.

A journey has definitely begun again. It is the flow of consciousness, thought, sound and digital data that will create the next release, piece by piece. Once again we let creativity take over: We start adding components as we see fittest, to produce the exciting but yet unseen goal.

And thus it remains to be proven if our music making paradigm could or even should ultimately be anything else.

Yet another year

[08.02.2005] The plan and the vision of the new album was conducted in year 2002. Now it's year 2005. What have happened during these years? Why isn't the recording ready yet? One could easily ask these questions, but the aswer remains unclear. Maybe it's because of a constant hurry, maybe it's because of total lazynes, or it may well be due to the unpropitious position of a stellar objects. But with no further explanations, we are to announce, that few more waveforms have been captured to expand the sonical textures of forecoming recording. There is also a glimpse of hope that some vocal tracks could be recorded in the blink of an eye(taking in consideration our all expanding timescale...)

The Miracle

[28.02.2005] Lo and Behold. What has just happened must be a some kind of miracle. Not even a month has passed since the last entry to this diary, and here we are again with some news to tell. Last weekend, we spent few hours of our precious time in our humble studio complex to capture the multiplicity of our newly recruited vocal talent T. Lekander. And what came out as a result had some freshly minted ideas which hasn't been explored before in such a depth by us.

The cycle

[29.03.2005] Three years have passed since the release of last Portrait of Beyond recording. To celebrate the anniversary, we recorded some of the guitar tracks which have been missing. A. Jokinen was kind enough to bring some melodical life to one instrumental song and his quick fingers also played a quite jazzy lead on one of not-so-jazzy tune. Even PM managed to layer some atonality and arrhythmic elements.

[23.8.05] Summer has past, but mercifully, not without traces. We have managed to capture some quest appearances to further supplement the diversity of instrumentation of the HTM-record. We recorded some Grand piano, harpsicord and rhodes tracks which were played by M. Myllykoski, along with oboe-line played by Mr. S. Antila.

2006

[26.07.2006] Portrait of Beyond proves to be the slowest working unit on this planet. But within the last year, we have successfully spent a few days recording the still missing parts of the record. Some female vocals have already seen the light of day, some are yet to be performed by S. Nykänen. A few guitar solos and some of the synthetic waves have also been tracked. More to follow.