JOURNAL

GIG IN HÄMEENLINNA QUESTIONS & ANSWERS!
April 11th 2011

A warm welcome to the second edition of our journal. Like before, we've got Jemo & Ville yakking here. Mountaineering accidents & alpaca conspiracies included!

V: Already brushing up our hats for next week's show, eh?

J: I'll be damned if I ever find a hat as good as the one that cheating bellboy got away with back in Amsterdam, 2006.

V: We were inches away from catching the bastard! I do have doubts, however, that it may have been a trained orangutan all the way.

J: Would fit with the hair on my pistachio ice cream. Suppose they call him Clyde?

V: Beyond doubt. Just think of the absurd complications that might arise should we ever throw a gig in the Netherlands and find a raving mad great ape storming up to the stage, wearing none other than your own hat!

J: The stuff all good on-the-road journals are made of. Like that instance a month ago in Kortepohja, when the left PA speaker burst in flames during your solo! (And believe it or not, dear reader, we don't even have to stretch the facts on this one.)

V: Never lie about a guitar solo, says I.

J: And never put out the flames created by one.

V: But we did seriously consider replacing our percussionist with a trained primate for a while. Was it K2 or Kanchenjunga he was trying to negotiate while falling victim to the most horrendous of injuries?

J: That's what they say, but I reckon it was much more akin to the broad head of Laajavuori.

V: A crazy man, he is, performing with all he's got. Read on to find out where to see him next!

J: But that being said, should we enter the just task of taking a look at the bulging mail box filled with inquiries after our last entry?

V: We most certainly should. Starting with the most distant mail all the way from Australia!

J: Snail mail, that's how Gaspard Oil does the jig! The paper was a bit wet, though, so it wasn't easy to make out all the details, but what we have here is certainly about... camels.

V: And not just any camels; a mysterious flock of French-speaking camels in the middle of the Great Western Desert, to be exact!

J: So they've gotten into the psychedelics all the way down below. Does it mention anything about the supposed final name of God we discussed earlier?

V: There is a blur like that near the end of the letter but, alas, it's too wet with the saline tears of lonely camel herders to be comprehensible. I myself highly doubt the authenticity of the letter, anyway, since the camels down there are stated to have only one hump, while every decent Gaspard Oil scholar knows that Mr. Oil only rode on beasts with three.

J: I saw a picture with him on the back of a five-humped one. Couldn't have been 'shopped, being on a piece of cardboard.

V: Well, the Man wouldn't have been friends enough with the Bedouins to be able to stop for a drink, would he? Better have a few humps for extra liquid there.

J: The man put foreign legionnaires ashamed of their desert-trotting capabilities. Enough of that nonsense, on with the mail; Joonas from Kuopio asks why we sing and write in English rather than in Finnish. Well, a decent question at that.

V: It indeed is. While the real reasons for a choice of language are always more intuitive than rational ones, such as the fact that you just can't say "naked" like "naked" in any other language, it is true that there are some rational reasons for our English, too. One of them, of course, is that most of the material concerning Mr. Oil himself was written - or forged - in English.

J: That, and we don't know enough French to do away with the rest. In Finland we find the Finnish language pretty much the common tone, while English is more the language of the drama. Every time I hear someone drop a line in English in the midst of a conversation, I get the feeling that he's quoting a movie.

V: Näinköhän tuo toimisi toisinkin päin?

J: Beats me. But it does make things more detached from everyday life, to sing in English. Also, I like many syllables and the general tone of sung English - I just hope I could do the language some justice.

V: Well, to be honest, we do drop a few lines in other tongues every now and then. French, Alutiiq & even a little bit of Finnish, I think, so far.

J: And German. Latin? Wonder what comes after my excursion to Rome. Come to think of it, if we were to have rocked a couple of hundred years back, the tongue of drama could've been Italian. And, of course, English limits us less on the audience. Even now we have a few mails from abroad.

V: But going on with the letters, we have Severi from Raahe wondering whether any of us actually has any experience in aviation or if we just rip it all from literature.

J: Apart from a couple of journeys on a passenger plane, I've been on a small private aircraft once as a child. And a while back, a hot air balloon landed on our crop in Sumiainen. For a minute there I expected a leather-clad aviator's head popping out of the basket, but then the GPRS-navigating backing forces drove to the site with their SUV's... A sad time we live in.

V: Geez, I didn't know that! I must confess here that I, on the other hand, have never boarded an aircraft of any kind in my life, except for the wings of love & psychedelic experience in my cosmic dreams.

J: Apart from this, we pretty much ingest everything we read and hear and process it through the strange trials of our heads.

V: A most sincere apology to Severi and any other flight enthusiast for all the inaccuracies and brutal mistakes we may have made in our lyrics as regards the mechanics of flight.

J: I once traded "engine" for the much more inaccurate "motor" in favour of alliteration. Sorry about that.

V: We blame it all on the influence of old Antoine's books.

J: Electric: anonymous asks in short if there is any real reason why we don't play with Fender guitars, and wants to know about the tubes on Ville's Marshall amp.

V: Well, the tubes on my Marshall amp are small, wineglass-shaped transparent bulbs that light up and become boiling hot as the amp stays on for some time.

J: And make the transportation of that device a crafty affair.

V: Andy once told me that I shouldn't break them, but believing the guitar to be a percussion instrument, I have never believed the man. That's all I know 'bout the little bastards. And there is no real reason why we don't play with Fender guitars. We'll be glad to do so, should anyone be willing to send us a few!

J: Our former bassist used a Mustang bass. Support independent culture! Donate your unused Fenders to the poor old sods of Gaspard Oil! We also accept deposits of old Rickenbackers and organs.

V: The prettiest ones will be destroyed in a spectacular manner on our future videos!

J: Erm, bee, änhhh...

V: And finally, we have another mysterious letter, this time from Savonlinna. This sorry bastard is wet as well, from some substance I believe to be wine.

J: The only sentence that can be made out is as follows: "A camel is declared the winner if his competitor falls to the ground or flees from the fight." What that has to do with the town of Savonlinna I fail to comprehend.

V: I took the trouble of googling it & found a suspicious Wikipedia article on the age-old Turkish sport of deve güreşi. We'll have to take a look at that, I think, on our next trip to the Middle East...

J: Persian theatre and camel races! Mush! But that's pretty much all we've got with the mail this time.

V: Send us more, e-mail or snail mail. Also, in a short while you'll be able to do that with a purdy little electric form on our website. We, however, also have good news for all Tavastian lovers of good vibrations: in spite of the terrible accident that befell our good drummer, we will indeed perform in Hämeenlinna next Thursday, with a human percussionist!

J: Sorry, Clyde. We find Juuso's odour much more endurable on the mini van.

V: Performing with us will be the fine gentlemen of Avaruuskaiut, a Finnish-singing good old prog group from Jyväskylä. Free entry! And there just might be one or two entirely new songs to be heard there.

J: In the near future we'll be also demoing new material, trying to figure out what and how to do with it.

V: I do sense an eerie camel conspiracy in some of the letters we received. I think we should keep an eye on the sturdy bastards.

J: Could it be... Oh no. Them alpacas of Hämeenlinna! Cousins of the half-hooved desert roamers!

V: Too late to cancel a gig... I think we'll just have to sacrifice ourselves & boldly enter the foaming mouths of the voracious beasts to serve the noble cause of rock'n'roll.

J:ä We'll let you know more if we make it. Stay tuned!
THE CAMEL WHISPERER
February 21th 2011

This is a journal written by the members of the Gaspard Oil ensemble. We'll discuss the weather, the occult, music and such, all for your entertainment (and ours). Attending the sittings this time are Jemo and Ville.

J: The fact that we lie 300 kilometers apart physically makes this a bit bizarre.

V: Well, it's an atomic age we live in, bro. No use for airplanes & other slow means of transport anymore.

J: This and other scientific achievements eventually made possible by the genius of monseigneur Gaspard Oil, eh?

V: So they say. Better take some caution whether to believe it or not, though.

J: Indeed. The thing with Gaspard Oil and traditional academic research is a complicated one. Studying his life and what came after is much akin to the studying of black holes. You learn from what you can't see, but must assume is or has been.

V: You think the big G used black holes as one of the ingredients in his (in)famous fuel?

J: For his plane, quite possibly.

V: Nothing but pure opium for the pilot, of course...

J: But the connection between The Man and cosmic cataclysms just popped up, by the way, on one of my trips to St. Petersburg...

V: ...& the forbidden documents of the Tsar's science academy?

J: ...& the forbidden documents of the Tsar's science academy. You know the shit they have there about Tunguska?

V: Tell me again.

J: That we have a decent suspicion that Gaspard was basically the main architect in that one too? A toke further, and he'd have cracked the the very Earth in two.

V: Brings me the shivers. And the MI6 might still be listening. They have the memory of an elephant, the bastards. Remember 1926 'n' Agatha's mysterious moves there.

J: Or the KGB. Speaking of Agatha - this just in - our collaborators in the States have done a fascinating job, bringing up some juice 'bout the many lives and eventual death of the broad. Seems there was some sort of a Chinese angle concerned with the death of Marié, an even nastier one than we previously had thought.

V: If there's one place where lightning never strikes twice, it's got to be the big G, y'know what I mean?

J: To the bone. All we know for certain is that this case ain't no duck soup.

V: Nor a night at the opera. Any news from our man in Prague, by the way?

J: Just exchanged the facts with him this afternoon. Seems them Jews didn't look too happily upon his nightly excursions to the Old Cemetery.

V: Can't blame them, though, knowing what he woke up there. Wonder how he'll get it to fit in his luggage on the plane back, though.

J: The golem incident? I wouldn't feel ashamed 'bout that. After all, there is pretty good reason to suggest that old Mr. Oil's Polish surname, with all the consonants and zero vowels, was actually a Jewish one.

V: The real spelling of YHWH, perhaps?

J: And the very reason them people didn't allow Santtu to visit their cemetery.

V: Come to think of it, actually, them Muslims have no less than a hundred names for their God. However, only 99 of them are revealed to us mortals during our lives.

J: Gonna recite them here, then?

V: No fear, not until our next gig. You see, the 100th name is only told us at the Last Judgment. There is one creature on this Earth, though, who knows this name while alive. Care to take a guess?

J: Hit them, bro.

V: Well, the camel, of course. Just think of the horrific consequences that genetic engineering could have for the Islam faith, should it someday make it possible for the camel to acquire the faculties of speech.

J: Or the Bedouin tales of a white man who walked the sands a hundred years ago, talking with the humped beasts like he was one of them...

V: "The Camel Whisperer"!

J: But there is more than that in common with Gaspard and the Mohammedans. Just as the poet Mowlana Rumi could appear in 9 places simultaneously and dictate a mystical poem in each of them, has the good ole Gaspard been witnessed in several places at the same stroke.

V: Nine only?

J: Well, Rumi lived some 600 years before G. There wasn't that many places then, I suppose. Didn't somebody claim the 100th name of God to be the Qur'an from the bottom to the top?

V: Hazy, man, hazy. I myself am of the firm faith that the closest thing man has ever come to reproducing the Ineffable Name is H. P. Lovecraft's shot, currently transliterated as Cthulhu.

J: Or poor Jacopo Belbo, figuring out all the anagrams from the letters of the Torah to find the good god's name...

V: All in vain. The only anagram of any use, after all, is "God's air-pal".

J: Which reminds me 'bout the fact that the band called Gaspard Oil is currently well on the road for its next studio album.

V: And a fine one, too. Full of fierce aerial battles between the Man & some pirates on the Indian Ocean, love stories between some pirates on the Indian Ocean and the snake turning up again, of course, which I must take as a direct reference to Kundalini Yoga.

J: I heard that the pirates were as Indian as good clogs. But can you ever be sure.

V: To the point. What's the latest on our organist, by the way? Already recovering from his mysterious disease picked up from the outskirts of the Jewish cemetery?

J: Doctors say he'll never dance again, but he's good enough to play the clarinet. Hope he's come up with some ball-squeezing klezmer melodies. Said he got that aviator flu! Ha ha!

V: A little bit of that Gaspard Oil humour again, eh?

J: Actually, I was being dead serious there.

V: He can't sing & he can't dance, but still he knows how to clap his hands!

J: Strange, I came to fancy some tea.

V: I myself am going to make me some hot chocolate. Signing off for tonight, then, are we?

J: Oye. And dear readers and gaspardistas, if you come to think of a question we should address in our upcoming entries, feel free to ask. Paper mail and pigeons preferred, but in extreme cases we'll accept e-mail sent to mail(at)gaspardoil.com. Until the next time!