Sunny Disaster was a one-off lo-fi side-project by the members of a homegrown folk-pop project "Korpraali Kukkakaali", Suonna Kononen, Arto Laitinen and Pasi Rytinki; then located in Jyväskylä, Finland.
See www.myspace.com/korpraalikukkakaali
It was the period after analogical four-track recorders with their Dolby B - buttons, but before cheap and easy mutitrack home studio computer programs. So we ended up recording live to DAT-tapes.
Sunny Disaster released one c-cassette-tape, "This Is My Station, These Are The Liberties" which was recorded in September 1997. It was reviewed in one or two places doing demo-tape reviews, and was considered somewhat lukewarm, although they appreciated some bits of the music, and some witty references in the text. Sigh.
I had been in Canterbury, Kent, for a year, and came back with a stack of texts penned by "Fat Boy Malone" (who since then has acquired a philosophy PhD from London, and currently may use another pseudonym). We came up with some texts in English ourselves and for fun made a tape. Some of the songs were even rehearsed prior to recording. I think we were set to record some Finnish material and while the gear was there, recorded the English songs as well.
During 1996-7 we practiced weekly (mostly the korpraali kukkakaali songs in Finnish, that is) in my rental flat in Kauppakatu 4A, amplifying bass and keyboards through stereos and leaving vocals, harmonica and acoustic guitar unamplified. We even recorded the songs in the flat, in two days or so. What a neighbour from hell I must have been :). Fun though. And the walls are pretty thick, as a brick.
So in the days before Cubase or Soundforge, we released the Sunny Disaster "studio live"-cassette as it was. (The "studio" here refers to the kind of flat I lived in.). Petri Heikkinen played electronic guitar on a couple of tracks, and if memory serves me well, Kai Kostamo and some others (Anna Vuorinen and Jussi Tolonen perhaps?) saw us from Kauppakatu and walked in for a cup of coffee and ended up making some intentional noises in one song ("Rot and mould").
The noise towards the end of "Death in disguise/Safety on a bread" was Suonna’s guitar string snapping. As there was a piano conveniently located at the corner of my flat, and the tape was running, and the rest of us kept playing, Suonna tried out a white key, or two.
The demo-song Bohemia by the Sea is not from this release, but a side-product from later DAT-recordings, equally unedited,
27.3.2008
Arto Laitinen
