(Technical Progressive Metal) Radiance - The Burning Sun - 2010, MP3 (tracks), 320 kbps

RADIANCE is the solo project of Sami Raatikainen, a Finnish musician/producer. THE BURNING SUN is the 2010 debut album. It is a continuous, 49-minute track and is meant to be listened to as a whole. The album is split into seven tracks purely out of practical reasons.
Sami Raatikainen is a Finnish guitarist who plays for the German technical death metal band Necrophagist. He joined Necrophagist in 2006 after the departure of Christian Münzner. He also plays guitar in the Finnish technical death metal band, Codeon.

Now that "The Burning Sun" is finally out, it's time to take a quick look back. What actually went into creating this album and what took so long?

Back in 2007, I had the basic concept of the album in my mind. I knew exactly what I wanted to do and what it would sound like. It was only a matter of translating the vision into notes, and it didn't take too long -- according to my project notes, I started writing for the album on 07/28/2007 and ten days later already had the basic structure and sections of the album written out. A month later, I had already recorded the final guitar tracks. I was working non-stop and would only pause to eat and sleep. The rest of the year went into writing and refining all the synths, orchestrations, additional layers and the tons of details present in the final version.

During this period, the first serious problem raised it's head. With the very large amount of virtual instruments I was using for the album, I was dealing with constant crashing of my audio workstation due to the memory limitations of 32-bit software. At the same time, I was running out of computing power because the project was steadily growing into megalomanic proportions. There was a period of nearly two months during which I couldn't practically do anything, because the project wouldn't run for more than 5 minutes straight. In early 2008 I found the solution to my problem: I ordered some parts and now had two networked workstations working in parallel, since the project couldn't be run by a single computer anymore. The work could continue!

I soon had the instrumental tracks of the album more or less finished, but was still lacking all the vocals. Since I had already done everything else myself, I figured I'd pull off the vocals as well with some practice. So for around six months straight, I spent hours nearly every day at my rehearsal room, practicing my singing. Even with the very heavy nature of the music, I wanted strictly clean vocals -- that was an important part of the vision I had for the album. I also knew exactly the type of voice I wanted for the album, and so I was mostly practicing on material from singers with that particular type of voice -- mainly, stuff from Mats Levén. While I was making great progress as a singer, I eventually realized what any vocalist can tell you: It takes a long period of time for your voice to "grow". The vocal cords won't change overnight, in the same way that you won't become the Hulk by going to the gym for a few months even if you do everything right. There is no shortcut around time and experience, and doing the vocals myself (to my high standards) would mean delaying the album by years. That was out of the question.

So, since I needed someone else to do the vocals -- why not ask the guy I wanted to sound like in the first place? Late 2008 I asked Mats Levén whether he'd be interested in doing the vocals for the project. He was. By accident, I had also bumped into a Finnish female vocalist by the name of Noora Häkkinen. I was immediately impressed by her voice and wanted to have her voice on the album -- she agreed as well. It felt like the pieces of the puzzle finally fell together. Due to some scheduling problems, the vocal tracks weren't recorded until late 2009 -- but the tracks were great, and the final phase of the production could start. Anticipating this, I built a new audio workstation, jumped over to the glorious world of 64-bit and never looked back.

2010 was spent solely in post-production. I had a 50-minute project with 460 (!) tracks of audio, where everything would need to fit together in the mix and still sound good without anything else falling apart. All this with my relative inexperience with audio production. However, I insisted on doing the mix and the master myself, because I knew exactly what the album needed to sound like and no other mix engineer would ever get the insane number of details and nuances of an album like this "right" (read: the way I wanted them). I also didn't have the Metallica-esque budget required to do a mix of this size in a state-of-the-art studio. After months of trial and error (incl. a lightning strike trashing the workstation once), I finally had finished the mix that I felt worked best for the album. It definitely was a tedious learning experience, but the lessons learned will help me in all my future work.

So, this is why it took over three years to complete "The Burning Sun" (although you have to take into account I was also doing months and months of touring with NECROPHAGIST at the same time). I'm sure the album could've been completed in half the time had I avoided all the issues and nonsense involved, but it got finished nevertheless and my motivation never faltered during the three-year period. It feels good to finally bring the project to a completion and I'm certainly satisfied with the results. Still ... I hope my next project doesn't take three years to finish!
After over three years of nerve-wrecking work, the RADIANCE debut album, "The Burning Sun", is finally released. Point your browser to music.radiance.fi or click on the album cover to listen to it. If you like what you hear, you can also buy it in practically any digital format you could possibly desire. For best sound quality I recommend the FLAC format, because in addition to being lossless it's also in the original 48kHz/24bit master quality.

"The Burning Sun" is a single, continuous 49-minute track (although it is divided into seven tracks for practical reasons), featuring great performances by vocalists Mats Levén (KRUX, ex-THERION, ex-YNGWIE MALMSTEEN) and Noora Häkkinen (NORADRENALINE). Produced, mixed and mastered by myself. Special thanks for their help during the completion of this album go out to Mats Levén, Noora Häkkinen and Tuukka Laitinen.
http://www.radiance.fi/

Mats Levén - Male Vocals (Yngwie Malmsteen, Therion, Krux, Abstrakt Algebra, Amaseffer, At Vance, Lion's Share, AB/CD, Apocalyptica, Jupiter Society, Adagio, Narnia)
Noora Häkkinen - Female Vocals
Sami Raatikainen - Music & Lyrics (Necrophagist, Codeon)