News — Late 2024

Sale: 50% off from all my music on Bandcamp until 31 December 2024.

This also applies to the full discography, adding this further discount to the already –35% price of that.

Simply use the discount code “simo24” at the checkout.

My Bandcamp is here.

Since the news item of 10 October 2024 regarding the remastering of the “Iceland 2016” music video, I've completed and shared a number of other remasters of my film works on my YouTube channel.

You can identify the new, final versions easily from the thumbnails, all of which include the titles and most of which specify “Remaster”. My Film pages (1 to 5 at the time of this writing) also incorporate all of these.

But please note that in order to make sure you can watch in the fullest available resolution, it may be necessary to view on the YouTube channel, as the embedded videos on the Film pages may not allow the full choice of resolutions. This is out of my control, as this is simply how YouTube embedding currently works.

The album The 13th Tale has come to streaming. For example, here it is on YouTube and here on Spotify. 

For the liner notes, see the Bandcamp page, where you can of course also purchase the music to own forever, available in a wide variety of formats.

Published my fifth album, The 13th Tale, consisting of 30 tracks. You can read more about it on this site here, and the album is on Bandcamp, where you can also read the liner notes.

With the release of this album, I started another music page, Music II, since the first one — Music I — was already lengthy. This is similar to the film pages, ranging at this writing from Film 1 to Film 5.

I completed a full remastering of this 2016 music video from the original 4k materials, sharper, more vibrant, and removing from the end the “Happy 2017” text that once served a purpose but no longer. This upload supersedes the earlier, now obsolete version.

You can view the video on YouTube as well as on this site’s Film 1 page. The music featured was released as part of my album Early Music Archive (more on that on this site here), which is available on Bandcamp and for streaming and download elsewhere.

Preparing the new edition of my sheet music book An Iceland Symphony, Op. 1: A Theatrical Symphony for All Ages, I finished revising the layouts for the longest and most intricate piece, “Love” for string orchestra. You can now view and download it in its presentationally perfected form on the Sheet Music page. The book is on schedule to be published in late 2024.

Premiered a new music video: “Secret Dawn”.

Filmed this September in the Finnish town of Kangasniemi, where I was born and grew up, and featuring my own music, which will be included on a future album.

Right now, this is my most recent filmed work. The music, complete with the title, was composed and executed already in 2020, but I needed to wait four more years — during which I never shared the music anywhere — to be in the right place at the right time to find the visuals to go with it.

This video is 100% natural and features no effects. The climactic shot, which told me this was indeed it, happened exactly that way in the camera as I filmed.

Announcing an upcoming improved edition of my first book of sheet music, An Iceland Symphony, Op. 1: A Theatrical Symphony for All Ages.

When I first published this book in 2021, there were technical limitations related to software that made it impossible to have the layouts ideal for each of the 21 sections.

These limitations no longer exist, so I’ve started a complete overhaul of the book’s presentational aspects: larger notes, better use of space on each page, and tidying up the notation where the software didn’t yet allow for perfect results back then.

No rewriting of the music itself is involved — it is just as it needs to be — but the new edition will finally look the way I always wished it to, with layouts as perfect as I was already able to provide with Tales from the North, Book I.

The work of re-editing each page and bar will take some weeks. I aim for a late 2024 publication.

Fixed an error that had made it into the fully written out sheet music of my composition “Land of Youth & Beauty” as published in my book Land of Youth & Beauty: Early Poems (Large Print Edition):

As seen in the corrected passage above, in bars 137–139 the fourth note from the bottom for glass harmonica is Fx4, that is, a double-sharp F4. This note is the sharp 11 in this C#maj9#11 chord. The glass harmonica notes in these three bars are: C#4, D#4, E#4, Fx4, B#4, G#5. Before the fix, bars 138–139 showed the Fx4 incorrectly as G4, with the tie from 137 to 138 therefore also naturally missing. This note should be a single, tied Fx4 note in these three bars.

The error, which existed only in the fully written out version of the sheet music — not in the more compact version also included (which indicates the length in bars of each held chord with a number above each bar) — has now been corrected in all the editions: hardcover, paperback, and ebook. 

Published a Large Print Edition of my first book of short stories, At Dawn: Early Short Stories.

As with the large print edition of Land of Youth & Beauty: Early Poems, this brings the book also to all readers with low vision and anyone who may simply want the book in this larger format.

The book is set in an extra large 24-point sans serif font. The hardcover is 8.25 x 11 inches in size, the paperback 8.5 x 11 inches, and this edition is also available as an ebook.

Please note that naturally these large print editions do not replace the original, smaller-sized editions. Instead, they are an additional edition providing the same content in a larger format, both in terms of the font size and the overall dimensions.

Published my 10th book, Tales from the North, Book I. It includes sheet music for this set of 12 piano duets, a 10-page introduction, and a revised catalogue section at the back about my various creative works so far. 130 pages, available as a hardcover, a paperback, and an ebook. The entry for this book on the Music I page is here.

As of yet, this set still awaits its world premiere performance or recording, though in 2023 I released an intentionally mechanical demonstration album of all 12 pieces. You can also access the full sheet music for the first two tales — one more than reported in the previous news entry — on the Sheet Music page.