Bear's Monthly Mayhem - February 2024!

I appreciate you!

Mar 05, 2024

Hi! Thanks for taking the time out of your busy life to read this! Monthly Mayhem has moved off of www.bearwiseman.com (which is where I’ve moved since my semi-retirement from Tuonela Magazine) over to a mailing list, as I think it’s generally a better way of keeping people up-to-date! I hope you enjoy this monthly write-up of my most recent reviews, projects, services, and merch gigs, as well as a general catch-up!

If you’re wondering if the purple links are safe, yes they are! They’ll take you directly to the articles and pages I’m referencing! And for those who are here because I promised cat pictures, I assure you, there will be kitties!

LIVE MUSIC FINLAND

February was a pleasantly quiet month on the live show front, which is generally how I’m trying to keep things for the moment. However, I am easily tempted by anything new and exciting, so Kai Hahto - Alone was definitely on my list of things to check out first thing this month and suffice to say it was worth it! I’ve simply never seen a solo drum show before, so I had no idea what to expect. Talent, apparently, was the short answer!

I’ve also been following Johanna von Hertzen (aka JoJo) since fall of last year (almost literally following her around—I’ve been to her last four shows now), because she’s such a huge supporter of the local indie music scene and she makes it really easy for me to find new music. So, every time she recommends something that catches my attention, I try to check it out. The first of these in February was Chico Muya’s solo show at Kahvila Mutteri in Lauttasaari. I recognized him for his funny Finland-related reels, so I was curious about what he sounds like musically. I was extremely pleased with what I saw and Mutteri was a very cool little local historical hotspot too! Furthermore, JoJo also started hosting her own musaklubi [music club] at Junk Y Vegan called JoJo & Friends, which is practically at the train station (it took me a while to realize that it’s in the old Painobaari, durr). The first edition had guests Emmy June and Luca Gargano this month. It’s a really cool concept and the restaurant had pretty good (vegan, obviously) food too—recommended!

The other show I was at was SIN at Tiivistämö, which was, frankly, very weird. It was three hardcore stoner bands, plus one of my personal favorites, Frozen Factory, who are very progressive and not remotely stonery. It wasn’t maybe the best scene for them but I hope it got them a few new fans, because the crowd was really enthusiastic and I got to see a few new things this time around!

MUSIC REVIEWS

Musically, the first of two new albums I wrote up this month was the self-titled debut from Today Was Yesterday. If you’re a fan of older rock music—stuff like Genesis and Led Zeppelin—they’re an act worth checking out! And of course, here’s the New Song Watch for February, which includes featured singles from Lost in Grey, Arion, Klara laFleur, Luna Kills, King of None, Monotonia, Endline, Classless Act, Frozen Factory, and Mia Hafrén, with Ayreon and Mia Hafrén (again!) included in the January missed tracks. Speaking of Mia Hafrén, I also reviewed her first English-language album, “For the Brave,” which I recommend for fans of ABBA and positivity.

Over at Tuonela Magazine, my only contribution this month was a premiere of the new Lost in Grey single, “Hailuoto,” which seems to have gone quite well! It’s a beautiful song with a great video, so it’s worth checking out!

Non-Music Reviews

The non-music reviews from this month are of Extraordinary Attorney Woo, which is a show that focuses on the autism spectrum, and the video game, Disco Elysium, which is a trippy storied deep-dive into the troubled mind of an alcoholic detective that came heavily recommended to me. For the eco-hippies out there, I recommend this review of Nuud anti-odorant! It’s one of the few eco-friendly, natural products that’s equally functional and affordable!

Beans (nee~ Bowser) & his father, Simon

Projects

One of the major things I accomplished this month was updating my Wordsmithy Services page on my website. I do have a handful of freelance skills that I offer, like editing, writing (press releases, for example), pronunciation coaching, voice acting, and transcription, but I don’t mention them nearly often enough. Since I’m trying to focus on doing what I enjoy these days, I figured I should tidy up that page and shout it out!

There hasn’t been much new on the creative writing front in February, though hopefully this mailing list keeps me honest and encourages me to dedicate more time to it. That said, I did publish a free piece of flash writing called Pearl Diving on my site that I wrote back in June or July of 2023. It’s about friendship and was inspired by Auri (the band and the Patrick Rothfuss character) and my friend Kathy Criswell. It was something that spawned in the sauna and is very much an effort at playing with metaphors. As always, of course, you can also get a fair bit of free creative writing and published story samples on my website, with links to where you can find them in full.

While there were no new Gathering of Geeks podcast episodes this month, I did release another episode of Off the Record, this time featuring Johanna Iivanainen and Johanna Kurkela of Altamullan Road. It was a really beautiful conversation and I would gladly interview them again anytime—they were so lovely to chat with. I dream of interviewing them at my office, so I could do a photoshoot with them in the nearby woods, which is full of ancient abandoned cottages. Big thanks to Grey Realm Studio for tidying up the audio!

My Off the Record interview with Elias Viljanen and Tommi Portimo of Sonata Arctica also came out, but I’m sad to say that The Riff is just so dark and there were so many people in the bar that both the audio and video were quite bad, so I opted to release it as a transcribed text interview. Unfortunate, but what can you do?

One other cool thing that I did this month was guest on the Metal Pizza Talkshow podcast. This was really fun, as it was my first time getting interviewed instead of being the interviewer! The guests are from all over the music industry, not just musicians, which I think is extremely cool, so you can also find episodes featuring some of my photographer friends, like Anna Brödel and Marco Manzi on the podcast, and musicians like Harri Koskela from Lost in Grey.

Also worth mentioning, if you’d like to support me by proxy and get a book the your trouble, you should consider funding Kathy’s book, Aphrodite Rising, on Indiegogo! I’m functioning as editor for this project and she’s a really brilliant wordsmith, so I can vouch that it’s gonna be a good book! And while I’m at it, you may as well check out her new website for her artwork too [wink].

Enslain Metal Merch

My only merch gig this month was the second night of Six Feet Underground at Kannusali, for Vorna. I was really excited about the show because Saruru were also there and I just discovered them at the aforementioned Frozen Factory show. Well, rather, I had heard of them but forgotten to ever check them out, but I realized that Marianne Heikkinen (FF’s drummer) is also the second half of Saruru, so I checked out their “Girls” single on Spotify and it hit me in my girl-power place.

I’ve never been to Kannusali before, so going there was a bit of a trip, in both senses of the word. There’s a parking lot right next to it, which is great, but the venue is inside what looks like an office building and, on entering, it feels like you’ve walked into a metro station as you descend into an underground tunnel. A sign suggested that I needed to go right, at which point I entered the foyer of a building, a sort of multifunctional place that has theater halls (where the gig took place), as well as other spaces, like music and sports rooms. The plus side of this was that the venue had its own upstairs club, but the downside was that most of the functional rooms are locked to keep random people from going into staff places. I couldn’t even find the backstage at first because I thought it was a wall.

That said, the staff there were very good at helping out. Without me even asking, a bunch of the guys got a lift so that they could shine a spotlight on my merch—what service! It’s a bit of a jaunt for me to get there but I’d love to actually see a show there sometime! I was very sad to miss Saruru’s set, but I was trapped doing actual work… woe is me.

His lordship, King Simon, being professionally handsome

General Bearsness

February started with a trip to my “voodoo” osteopath. I really like this guy, because what he does is either extremely non-invasive, or extremely invasive, depending on how you look at it. I love it because I don’t need to strip down and have my body juggled around like with the standard osteo. I just lay down and a few gentle fingers are enough to encourage my body to realign itself.

There were two interesting things that happened this time around though. The first was that I got emotional afterwards, which hasn’t happened before, but made sense because he said he deals with trauma release and that many of my locks are caused by trauma (figuring out if it’s emotional or physical is always exciting).

Then, the day after (while still emotional), I was sitting on the couch and I felt something like a bubble forming in between the two vertebrae that are notoriously locked up. I was pretty concerned, not knowing if I was about to rupture a disc or what was happening, but the end result was my spine releasing into a good position.

On Wednesday, I was trying to work when my whole spine, back, shoulders, and neck started to scream at me for maintenance. I went and did some stretches and yoga, which caused my whole body to realign with a million pops and cracks, and finally, I was a whole new person. All of the pinches and pains that riddle me all the time were gone. That Saturday, I stood through the whole Frozen Factory show with absolutely no pain whatsoever—a miracle after 15 years!

Unfortunately, however, it locked back up on Sunday and has refused to speak to me since. The osteo suggested that one trauma has released, making way for another one to step in… long story short, I seem to require more maintenance before I’m all better. That said, it’s good to know that there’s a good space to be found eventually! It’s a small victory, but I’ll take it, and hopefully things continue to improve after my next treatment in March.

In the gaming scene, I missed the IGDA meeting this month because I dehydrated myself too severely in the sauna and gave myself a severe headache for 3 days(!), which was a shame, but I made up for it by having my friend (who is usually my date to those parties) come out and visit for the first time, finally. I need to get more people out here to the cat-filled office, it seems!

I’ve also been trying to kick my butt to run more sessions of my Zweihänder TTRPG game, which I kicked off with tutorial sessions in December. This game is really fun, based off of the Kingdom Death: Monster board game (which, to be clear, I loathed), so it’s been fun to put the world into interesting use! I wasn’t very happy with how the Explore the Dark session went, but I’ve been learning more about game prep, so I look forward to throwing something a little more exciting/intense at them this weekend.

In other news, I hate to dare to jinx myself, but I like to put good news out into the world and I think it’s worth mentioning that my depression is right about 98% gone these days. Accepting some failures and moving on with my life is a tough pill to swallow, but the refocusing on what I love and am passionate about has made a world of difference in how I feel on a daily basis. Yes, there is still a 2% of the time that I feel that old darkness creep in and life is still a struggle, but I’m at least feeling better, which in turn gives me more energy to get things done. I haven’t taken any regular/prescribed medication for my depression since sometime in 2021… it was a rough ride to forge forward without it, but I’m so glad that I did.

That’s about it for things I can remember to mention about February. Thanks for reading this far, if you did! Since you survived, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes before telling you what’s coming up next month:

“Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something.”

— Jake the Dog, Adventure Time S01

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Coming Next Month…

Gathering of Geeks season 2 will start on March 5th, with… holy crap it’s Kathy Criswell again, as my first guest. This was such a fun episode and I’m so glad we got to do it IRL! It’s always a bit more fun, in my opinion. This is also coming out now because she’s got that book I mentioned earlier coming out, so I want everyone to not forget that she exists and is amazing!

I’m also doing a couple of Off the Record interviews, one with the aforementioned Today Was Yesterday and the other with Juhis Kauppinen of Merta, who I’ll be selling merch for in April on their album release tour! I’m hoping to get the Lost in Grey folks back soon to Unleash another one of their albums and do a proper interview too, though let’s see how I can manage my March energy. You can rest assured that there will be reviews of both of their new albums incoming.

I’m seeing my third Altamullan Road show on the 2nd and I’ll be at Mia Hafrén’s album release show on the 8th—I should get her for an interview sometime as well, she’s so interesting! Then comes Maaliskuun Mustamessu, IGDA, hopefully JoJo & Friends, and maybe Hevisaurus, since they’re playing nearby. Frozen Factory also have another show and Sonata Arctica are also celebrating the release of their new album, so hopefully I’ll be there too!

Who knows what else will happen?

And below is my Best of 2024 playlist! Welcome to follow along!

Bear's Book of Balance

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