My old buddy and drummer Heine Lennart, wrote and asked if I could record some djent like guitar for a bicycle advert he was making.

He send me a bunch of advanced drum tracks, but my mind weren’t up for complicated stuff, so I involuntarily took a left turn, and picked two bars of one of his tracks, made a midi drum track, that was kind of similar and looped it.

Some days later, I sat down grabbed my 7 string Strandberg and started playing som heavy stuff through my 10 year old Kemper Profiler, with a 5150 profile that me and Tue Madsen from Antfarm Studios, made years ago, when he was curious enough to try out the profiler for himself.

It sounds great out of the box, so all the guitar sounds are straight out of the Kemper, with a set of presets I made for myself.

The synth like sounds are guitars with a bunch of delays on them. There are no keys on this song.

When I decided on the riff with the seven string, I went into the basement and grabbed my 1993 Music Man EVH, that I had neglected since I moved to my new hood. It had fell out the back of a trunk and a chunk of wood had broken off, just where my forearm sits on the body.

I had tried to fix it with some glue and some clear coat lacquer. But sort of gave up, because it doesn’t look good. But since then, the lacquer have hardened and although it ain’t pretty, it doesn’t feel bad any more.

So I went all in, and gave it a lot of love. Dusted it off, cleaned the frets, neck and body with steel wool and then soaked the dry as a desert neck with oil and later when it had dried up, gave it a lot of wax. Then put on new unbreakable 09 – 46 D’Addario NY XL strings and started adjusting the thing.

The neck was totally out, because I used to have 10 – 52’s on it. But the basement definitely also had an impact. But after adjustment of the truss rod and a slight adjustment of the Floyd Rose bridge, it came alive like I had never put it away.

I have a Brownish Sound preset on my Kemper and went down the rabbit hole, playing all the Van Halen songs I can somewhat play. But the sound didn’t fit this song, so I chose a legato like preset, that I made with Allan Holdsworth in mind and then the solo sound was in place.

The Music Man just sings like nothing else. The volume pot was not in a good mood, but after some massage, the crackle and pops, went away, and I could attack the song with the nicest sounding lead, I have had for a long time. Then I added some synth like guitar swells and recorded two cinema like chords, that aren’t the same, but close enough.

And lastly picked up my fretless ESP Jbas tuned the E string to B and played the djent part with a skinny pick, to get something useful out of it. It really isn’t made for this sort of music.

After a quick mix I felt pretty good about this 2.20 minute song, and then went further down the rabbit hole and found some footage from 2019, where I made documentary for Fujifilm and picked some clips, that I felt could work for a video, so I could post it here on youtube.

I hope you like it. I kind of dig it myself, which is somewhat rare. I usually don’t have much control of the songs I make. They often go in a completely different direction than expected. This one did as well, but I’m pretty pleased with the result.

Sincerely Palle Schultz

What is the X-H1

The interface

A Performance by Nanna Hanfgarn

Filmed with the Fujifilm X-T2 and SamYang lenses

The amazing side effect Distortion has is that, even though it is noisy like a nightclub, it shuts down before midnight and it goes somewhat quiet, except for the clubs that continues throughout the night.

This is not usually the case when people set up their P.A. bikes from Wednesday to Saturday all through the summer on the bridge close to my apartment, when the weather allows it.  When Distortion is at it, the noise is somewhat regulated and even better – tomorrow the festival will be in another part of town, and Nørrebro where I live, will be very quiet.

That music

Do I sound like an old angry man right now? Well, let me explain. I’m a musician as well as a photographer. I made a living as a professional musician many years ago. I’m deeply in love with music. I love Soul, Jazz, Rock, Classical, Metal, Pop and everything that inspires me. But I have a blank in my musical taste. I really love Drum’n Bass, because of its complex rhythms and its energy, but what I really dislike, is when you replace the drummer or the complex rhythms with a pounding bass drum on every single beat, banging away like a hammer, with no complexity what so ever. Just BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM….. The Distortion Festival is, apart from very few exceptions, just that. Among danish musicians it is referred to as the German Stomp. Because it sounds like marching Nazis.

You can tell that a lot of the music that are played from the different stages, are assembled by DJ’s and many without much musical training. It is not as horrible as it once was, but you regularly hear a song with a vocal hookline that are out of key with the bass and harmonies, if you can call it harmonies… To a musician, that is like dragging your nails across a blackboard.

I know that it is common to explain my dislike towards this techno / electro music, with the generation gap, where every new generation manages to make music that the older generation thinks is shit.

But think of it in another way – where can we possibly go from here? We’ve reached the tribal stage with electronic music. The great electronic musicians have already made incredibly beautiful music, with the likes of Brian Eno and the Godfather of it all: Jean Michelle Jarre.

It started out on another level, but sunk into tribal pounding gimmicks. There is the heavy metal of electronic music with the Skrillex genre, if you can call it that and then there is the clubmusic, with its enormous amount of genres. But even as a trained musician I have a hard time, telling them apart. But again, what can possibly come next? What will make the hardcore EDM lover in some years go: “Damn that young generation makes really shitty music!”? Will it be young DJ’s playing something that resembles a grinder? I don’t know. But I can’t imagine music to go to a simpler stage, because I have a hard time imagining music in a simpler form.

Deconstruction

To me the laptop music at the Distortion festival goes a bit like this: You sort of set the pace with a super short intro, then introduce the pounding bass drum, shift between a handful of samples, and mixes it up a bit.

Then there is the part where you omit the bass drum, then later reintroduces it after a rally up. It is sort of the climax of the tune, called “dropping the bass”. In the most basic version, a really cheap sounding snare drum sample leads up to the reignited bass drum with a quantised snare roll. Some DJ’s let that roll continue for a while to heighten the tension amongst their audience and then drops the bass, meaning reintroducing it, with a couple of more layers on top of it.

So the electro sort of lives off a bit of dynamic tension, and a few samples. I’m sure every person who loves this kind of music or makes it, hates me by now. But hey, I don’t drink alcohol either, so that might be another reason. Play some Meshuggah and I will lighten up like a christmas tree with sheer delight. But a pounding bass drum on all 4 beats, brings me down immediately.

Crowded crowds

Walking about the streets of Distortion can be challenging. There are some bottlenecks around, where you get more or less squashed. Most people don’t stand in the same place for long. There is a steady stream of people wandering about. I’d say 75% of the people are on their way to somewhere else, except for the big stage at Sankt Hans Square, that seemed to be one of the few places, that were actually able to keep a large crowd for more than one 15 minute mix.

The pissing contest

The festival have put up a lot of booths where you can relieve yourself. But they do not seem to attract young guys under 30. For some reason a dude have to piss on something. The ground just doesn’t cut it as a legitimate target. A dude needs a target. So everything you can imagine are used as pissing targets. Fences, doors, doorknobs, staircases or whatever is at groin height or slightly higher. If you are a bit sensitive, you cannot ignore the same people shaking hands, hugging and eating just after they made someone elses property wet, and never got near any sort of disinfection fluid.

The ground is sticky

For some reason people at festivals throw their shit around like a chimpanzee. For some other reason the last quarter of a beer seems undrinkable and therefore are emptied out on the ground, and soon after becomes sticky goo, that everyone else needs to step in. Same goes with trash. I’m aware that it doesn’t take long before trashcans and containers are full. But festival goers do not seem to have even the slightest intention of throwing their litter even near a garbage container. It is as if that they live their daily lives as a moral citizen, and then goes completely bonkers, when they attend a festival, with a strong “fuck everything” attitude.

I have a hard time coping with people who throw their garbage around. At a festival, well okay, people are letting off steam, and needs to make some sort of whimsy rebellious statement, by throwing garbage around. But it isn’t much better when the festival is over. Apart from smokers carpeting the grass areas with cigarette buds, it is unbelievable what people throw into the lake where I live. Swans, ducks and all sorts of animals live in that lake, and still these dirtbags throw all kinds of shit into the lake. I just can’t imagine why?! Why is it so hard to throw your shit into a garbage bin? There are plenty of them all around, and yet the beer bottle and the odd bike, gets thrown into the lake…

I hope that one day the animals collect all the garbage and just throws it into one of the littering douche bags living room, with the words: “Here, we think some of this is yours!” and then just leaves the guy with a livingroom full of garbage. That would be awesome. Reality unfortunately is, that no-one even gets a fine.

The folks

I do not consider myself as a street photographer. I’m too shy. But for some reason, some people jump in front of your camera and want’s you to take their picture. They don’t ask were it ends up, they just pose. I’m really happy that they do so, or else I wouldn’t get pictures like these.

Distortion have been really lucky with the weather this year. Sunny and hot, which is quite unusual, even at this time of the year. It might have caused some people to dehydrate. But all in all, the festival seemed peaceful and the crowd were in a good mood. Drunk, with leaky bladders and throwing garbage around. But at least happy it seemed. Good for them, good for everybody. Tomorrow they have left for Vesterbro, while their garbage will remain for the municipality to clean up, and they will. They are quite effective when it comes to cleaning up the city. Except for the lake… The lake is the largest trashcan in town, and it seldom gets emptied.

Before I went to Iceland, I asked a native what clothes to wear… He had a funny look on his face, when he told me to dress for winter. I later understood the full meaning of the look on his face. It clearly meant: “On Iceland you decide nothing, Iceland itself is the decider of all things.”

Brown Orange and Blue

When set for landing near Reykjavik, the ground turns brown. It must be the brownest land you’d ever seen. But you’ll soon get used to the color scheme that is Iceland: Brown, Black, Blue and white spiced up with the earthy coloured yellows, orange and green.

When you set foot on the ground, you are already in awe. At the airport. The large brown plain is surrounded by far away snowy mountains. When you come from Denmark, that is a spectacular sight. If you come from Norway or Colorado, it is business as usual. But as a photographer, you know that the photo opportunities will be plenty.

On Iceland, the clouds move

The cool thing about the crazy weather on Iceland is the always scattered clouds. It’s a gift to any photographer. Although the light changes constantly, you just have to wait for the right moment to get fabulous scenarios. If the light isn’t awesome right there and then, but you like the scene, then wait a minute or two, and soon the scene will be lit in the most spectacular way.

The picture above is Dyrhólaey Lighthouse. It was rainy when we arrived, so the lighthouse was more or less a gray mass surrounded by eager photographers. I know photographers who are very keen on staging people in their shot, for some reason I wait until they are out of my frame, especially if it is another photographer – It just becomes too meta. And yet, as you’ll see later, I sometimes change my mind and do the meta shot anyway. But anyways – a greyed out Lighthouse presented itself too flat for my taste, so I framed and waited a few minuttes. When most people were out of the frame,  and the sun broke out behind the clouds, I had my shot. The Lighthouse was framed perfectly by the light and the dark blue and grey clouds behind it for just af few seconds – fortunately it happened while I was waiting for it to happen.

The size reference

Once in a while I do like a human in the frame as a size reference in an epic landscape. Often epic scenes appear smaller than they really are and then it is pretty cool to have a person or an object people can relate to, to indicate the sheer scale of things.

The angry boiling water

Our hotel was located right next to Geysers and aptly named Geysir Hotel. Most of the party went to the hotel restaurant to eat, except for me and Jonas Rask, who immediately went up to the Geysers. It was a grey sky and overcast, so the blue colors of the Geyser would stand out more.

When satisfied, we went to eat at the hotel and found out that Icelanders makes really delicious food. From decent Cafés and up, the food is awesome, and they are not afraid to spice it plenty.

The Geysir erupts without warning. I tried to spot some sort of trigger warning, but the only thing that could tell that it would erupt, was time passed since the last eruption. It just suddenly bursts into a cloud of haze, and the only way to capture it, is to frame it and wait in that position from 7 to 15 minutes and release the shutter quickly. In its early stage, you see the blue color clearly until it a split second later, turns into a white haze.

Water is a wet affair

Iceland is known for its many waterfalls. One thing about waterfalls is their wetness. They do spray out a lot of moist. And of course you want to make them pictures epic, and therefore the rule of any waterfall photographer is: make it look like foam. Everybody was running around with 10 Stop ND filters, and I swore that I’d stay away from that and do something more true to reality, and then I packed my Fujinon 14mm and my Lee Seven5 Big Stopper and did the exact opposite… I do not regret that I did the long exposure thing, and I’m quite pleased with the pictures. But I am puzzled why my unconscious self do not take orders from my conscious self. I must be so anti authoritarian, that I won’t even follow my own orders… Talk about a split personality.

It’s not a pony

One advice on Iceland is not to walk backwards. Especially as a photographer. You’d probably end up injured in a ditch. Another great advice is not to call their Icelandic horses ponies – just don’t and don’t ask why! The Icelandic horse is famous for its less nervous nature than i.e. Arabic horses, which in the real world means that the Icelandic horse is nervous about most things, where the Arabic horses are downright psychotic. It also does the töltið, which means a sort of trot, but it carries the rider so gentle, that the saying goes, that you can read the saga’s on the back of your Icelandic horse doing the töltið. It actually said “write the Sagas”, but lets not suggest the impossible.

The Icelandic language are known for being one of the most difficult languages on earth. It is an ancient language and so rooted and isolated from other cultural influences, that the Icelanders can read original 1.000 year old sagas. So if you want to hear how the scandinavian languages sounded a thousand years ago, listen to the Icelandic tongue.

Titanium rods makes no Wolverine

At the southern coast, there is a stranded DC3. Anyone who ever saw a picture from Iceland have seen this wreckage. For some reason, the landowner had put a stop to people driving the about 4 kilometers to the site. We had to walk. It might not seem like much, but when you, as in I, have titanium rods inside your femur and solid screws through your bone to keep it in place, a 4 kilometer walk, on a bad leg day, is not the most ingenious idea in the world. It might be considered down-right stupid. But I did it, and a few hundred meters into the experience, I knew I had made a mistake. But as said before, I seldom follow my own orders, and that really stubborn rebel inside me takes over the show.

So I went all the way down there, to that plane that is surrounded by all kinds of tourists. I was done, like in completely crushed when I arrived wearing my raincover in a hailstorm, I had leg pains you can’t imagine. I was helped up and into the plane, where people came in for shelter and I must have looked like a dead man. My good friends, despite of sore feet, took my bag pack and carried it all the way back. I just had to get myself back, which I couldn’t imagine how would be possible. I was done, and there was at least 4 kilometers back to the car.

Well, first of all, there was nowhere in hell, that I’d walk all the way there without pictures of that god damn wreck. So yet again, without being able to see properly, because of the excruciating pain, I waited until people were out of sight, to the sides and behind the plane, and took the picture.

For me heading back was pure survival. I couldn’t walk anymore, but I couldn’t expect anybody to carry me or drive down to fetch me. Their feet hurt and they had to carry my backpack as well. So everything went into the vacuum of now… There is only now, and there is only the next step. You look up and you see the cars not too far away, you walk for what seems to be hours, and look up again, and the cars seem equally far away.

While forcing one foot in front of the other, in my head I had a quiet conversation with the land owner, cursing him for not allowing vehicles on this god forsaken piece of nothing – It is rock and black sand, that’s all there is! If there was anything that could be disturbed, I’d understand the prohibition. But there literally is nothing to destroy. Maybe he’s just sick of tourists…

Well 1 + 1 steps become many, and when my body was near a total collapse, I fell into the backseat of the car and my body just gave in. That evening I had to skip anything but lying in bed. Next day were a little less painful and the day after, my legs were back to a normal set of reasonably well functioning walkers. That is how things are, when you are half a robot. But I’m surely grateful for the lovely people I was with. They carried my stuff and made me food, because getting out of bed the next day, took a while, and I couldn’t make it to breakfast at the hotel. But that doesn’t matter when friendly souls have sandwiches ready for you, when you get into the car.

And now, back to the weather

As mentioned, the weather at the wreckage went from cold, windy and sunny to a hailstorm and then back again to less windy weather and partly sunny. It hits you, that complaining about the weather, as we often do in Denmark, is downright ridiculous in Iceland. It just doesn’t make any sense, because you have this overwhelming feeling, that Iceland doesn’t really give a shit about you or your high horse. On Iceland you just obey, follow and adapt.

The Icelandic climate is both awesome and crazy. One morning before dinner, we went through all seasons in a few hours. It started out really cold with pretty heavy rain, later it went into sleet, then snow, then sort of a snowstorm, then light snow, where we had to give up crossing a mountain pass, because the car rental company had decided to equip their car with summer tires… If you go there, do not accept summer tires or 2 wheel drive – it will transport you on the roads in the summer, but it won’t do you any good, anywhere else or at any other time a year… At all!

Back to the weather. When standing there in the snow, with a car that couldn’t go further, we did take som pictures right there and then went to Reykjavik, where it was nice and sunny and + 9-12° Celcius. This changing seasons in half hour intervals is something the Icelanders are used to and it does not take long until you just give in to the circumstances and become one with the climate. It just is what it is, until it changes completely 20 minutes later.

You had me at Ice

We went on to Reykjavik, the capitol of Iceland. There aren’t that many people living in Iceland. About 350.000. Most of them in and just outside Reykjavik. So there is a lot of potential for loneliness and art. The Icelanders seem to appreciate art, music and culture in a big way.

No matter who you are or where you live, Iceland is a place you should put on your bucket list. And you should stay there for a while. I will definitely go back, and it will not be a 5 day trip, I’d rather stay there for at least months, so I can plan the right photos, in the right light at the right time of year, in a 4 x 4 vehicle that can take me wherever I want to go.

Iceland, you won me over.