Last Saturday November 9. I played my first official live show as Runaway Droid at Helsinki Synth City Festival. What an awesome experience! Way more people showed up than anyone expected. Ääniwalli was packed with 600-700 people during the night.
We had an awesome festival line-up: Nina, Robert Parker, Ace Buchannon, Millennium Falck, Levinsky, Kizunaut, VVOV, Glowline, Runaway Droid.
A heartfelt Thank You to everyone who came to see us!
We went all in with the marketing and did pretty much everything within the Helsinki Synth City collective to make the festival possible without a crazy budget. We had AR posters (thanks to AR partner and sponsor Arilyn!), a trailer movie for the festival shot and edited by Glowline (Detailed credits in the video above). Glowline also did the lights on Kallio Stage so without him my live would have looked pretty dark! Thanks to Petri Pekkarinen for being our "The Driver" not only in the film but also during the festival! We also had a movie screening of "Tonight She Comes" by Matt Stuertz with Night Visions Festival. Hotel Rivoli Jardin accomodated our special headliners and let us shoot a part of our movie trailer in their finest room. I did my part by designing the logo and some posters and such while Millennium Falck and Levinsky did all the heavy lifting by organizing the whole event and contracts and all event producing matters. Without the hard work of these guys within only 3 months from zero to a full blown festival it would have never happened.
One of the coolest things after the festival was this article by YLE (The Finnish equivalent of BBC). Thanks Jussi Mankkinen from YLE who came to the festival and interviewed and took photos and video; Synthwave in Finland finally got some mainstream attention on national media!
Getting ready
I started to work on my live set last summer and tried to make it as entertaining as possible by playing both guitar and keyboard (& keytar) and "singing" with vocoder on Memory Core. Back when I started making Synthwave I didn't plan to do live performances so some tracks were quite tricky as I had not designed the parts for live playing at all. Also I'm not a keyboardist so I took up keytar in a few months for this. I do compose with a midi keyboard but I'm really not a player, I'll need more practice with that in the future. I have played guitar for 20 years but that wasn't too much help as the concept is quite different and my choice of all black keys wasn't the smartest one in a dark live room with sunglasses on... Luckily two weeks before the event I had a gig at a private space themed party to see how my set works.
New Releases
I have 3 new singles out since the last blog. Check out Memory Core for vocoder vocals, Rocket Machine for guitar solos and Reconfiguration (Cyberpunk Mix) to tune into Blade Runner month which is now! It's November 2019 like in the movie!
What's next?
For the past 9 years I've been playing guitar in a rock band called KARMIA which I formed with the vocalist Sharan. Recently we decided to put the band to rest for several reasons. While it's sad and quite emotional this allows me more time for my passion to Synthwave.
Right now I'm mastering my next single release for December. I'm trying to release a single per month while working on the 4th Runaway Droid album. Follow on Spotify to get them as they release! These singles will lead to an album release hopefully some time in the first quarter of 2020.
Now that I've performed my first live Synthwave sets I'm ready to do more and will be looking for cool opportunities in the future. If you want to book me check the contact info at the bottom of the page!