Aavepyörä
I first heard goa trance music around 1997, and started going to parties two years later. I was interested in making music, and had been listening to tracker music from the start of the 90s, but for some reason never tried writing anything since the software was not easy to approach, and I thought I didn't understand music. There were no VSTs, not really any kind of virtual synths, and hardware was expensive. Then software started coming out in DOS first, and finally in Windows too. I stumbled upon Orangator, and started playing with the options. One day then I realized it had a sequencer too, and I put in some notes. Suddenly I realized that if I put notes in divisions of four, I get a rhythm, and starting to choose notes by ear I realised that I don't NEED to use all 12 notes at once (this had baffled me the most before). So I found what a scale was. Since I chose them by ear, most of my music is modal to this day, by the way, I have never used chord progressions or the typical major/minor scales, except accidentally maybe. Well, that was it! I took some samples I made with Orangator to Fast Tracker 2, and made some patterns. It was easy! And sounded exactly like my goa albums! (at least to my ears at that time<g>) So I started making my first track, it took around 6 months or so, doing it by ear, second by second, and creating patches in Orangator all the time for sounds. I still didn't grasp the idea of how to structure a song, but anyway made the song. I also finally met some people who were making tracker music too at that time, and could start to exchange ideas. I also moved on to Impulse Tracker. They had a group called Aavepyörä, and I joined them, and we made our first self release in 1999 (to this day, the only AVP release not in the internetz), altough I still didn't have music on that album. We didn't write tracks together that much, and I especially had exceptionally bad skills with working together. I also made two albums under the name Summamutikka with Dream Station, since I thought that Aavepyörä would be an outlet only for my more experimental music. So we were a collective, and made some albums, selling them for $1 on the streets, and around 2001 IIRC, put them in the internet for free.At that time there were not many groups doing that, people were very jealous about their music, and even many gifted people whose music to this day stayed unreleased beause they couldn't get a contract, and didn't want to give away the music. I don't exactly know what happened between that time and 2006, but I guess the music went to places far and wide, for in that year I suddenly got an email from Ukraine asking me to perform. Wow, wasn't I astonished :D So I went, and years of travelling and playing ensued, and I had the time of my life. Thanks to all the people for that! Lately I have been doing a lot of other things in my life, so travelling has played a minor part. Anyawy I have been making music all the time, and I still spend much of my free time working on tracks. And there is no end in sight!