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Released my fourth album, Passages Dark and Light II, on Bandcamp. For more, see the entry on the Music page. The album is also available for streaming and download in various other places online.
Published a Large Print Edition of my first book of poetry, 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 a large 18-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.
Also included in this edition: the sheet music for my composition “Land of Youth & Beauty”, the liner notes from Bandcamp for my own rendition of this piece, the background notes from YouTube on the short film the piece was composed for, and an updated catalogue section of my creative works.
Presenting the What Now with Simo, Season 3 book in a video demonstrating how it looks, feels, and sounds as a physical item. Also featured is more of my Season 3 theme music than was ever heard in the episodes themselves. Here is a link to the video embedded on this site, and you can view it in full 4k on my YouTube channel here.
Double single release — that is, two singles released this same day: “That Dark, Dark Night” and “In the Fog, Deep”.
For more on these, see the Music page entries for “That Dark, Dark Night” and “In the Fog, Deep”. Both singles are available on Bandcamp complete with liner notes as well as numerous streaming and download places online.
Published What Now with Simo, Season 3 on Amazon as a hardcover, a paperback, and an ebook.
This pivotal season includes long, in-depth discussions with two legendary figures: actor & writer David Lee Homb and composer & artist Pierre Estève.
Also featured in this third volume of the series: an introduction, numerous footnotes offering further commentary and information, detailed tables of contents, and some surprise extras.
Above is the back cover. You can see the front cover on the Writing page entry for this season 3 volume. For more on the podcast, see the Podcast page, which includes links as well as episodes embedded right on the page.
Started the new year with a new episode of my podcast: 5.12: “Rendezvous at the Dream Café”. This year has a lot ahead: books, music (both releases and sheet music), filmed works… But first, in this episode of more than one hour we visit an imaginary café under construction.
All my music releases on Bandcamp are on holiday sale from 20 December 2023 until New Year’s Day 2024. The full discography is also available for a further 35% discount. All these releases include sleeve notes of various lengths. To learn more about my music, see the Music page. Happy end of the year to all my friends and supporters!
Before I started publishing and releasing my own works, I wrote and did other types of text work for four games published between 2010 and 2014. So I finally added this Games section to my Writing page.
All four images above copyright © the respective owners. Used here only for purposes of illustration.
Started creating dedicated Film pages — so far Film 1, Film 2, Film 3, and Film 4 — for all my filmed works. These pages will be works in progress while adding all these credits to IMDb, and in the future there will be further works. Filmmaking and screenwriting are among my major passions and callings, so this is a direction I’ll continue moving in. Each of the videos so far can be found both embedded on these Film pages and on my official artist channel on YouTube, where you can ensure from the settings that you’re seeing each video in the highest quality. Most of them are either 4k or HD.
I’ve now removed all my music except one track from SoundCloud, for several reasons:
1) I only ever intended to use SoundCloud until I’d start releasing my music professionally. Since that’s now happened and most of the early music I used to feature on SoundCloud is included on my Early Music Archive album of 50 tracks, it no longer makes sense for me to feature these pieces there.
2) Since I hadn’t uploaded new music there for many years, anyone visiting my SoundCloud profile would get a misleading impression of my musical progress.
3) I wish to keep my life manageable and elegant, so rather than also try to maintain a SoundCloud presence, eliminating that presence was much wiser.
The only track I kept there is one with a special significance to me: a very early song I had written, called “Forest Song”, in a recording that my musical friends Jan and Hana surprised me with many years ago. It was the very first time I had heard my music performed by others. I wanted to preserve this inspirational gift there.
But yes, otherwise I’m no longer on SoundCloud, and my music can be found on Bandcamp and numerous other places online for purchase or streaming.
Created a new PayPal donation link that offers various options regarding any donation. This is what it looks like. As an independent creator, all donations are extremely meaningful and helpful to me. You can access the donation page by clicking or tapping the image above or from the “Support” section on the front page of this site.
Released my first single, “Land of Youth & Beauty”, on Bandcamp. For more, see the Music page. On Bandcamp you can also read the liner notes explaining the origin and background of the music and the title. This single is also available for download and streaming in all the major online places.
In addition to being available for purchase on Bandcamp (where nearly all proceeds from sales go to the artists and therefore greatly help them in creating more), the album Early Music Archive is now also available in all major online places for streaming and/or download. You can simply search in your preferred place using either my name or the title of the album.
Released my third album of music, Early Music Archive, collecting all the best finished pieces from the earliest of my first ten years of making music. It consists of 50 tracks, a total of about 132 minutes of music, and is available for purchase and streaming on Bandcamp, where you can also read the liner notes of more than 3,400 words offering commentary and thoughts on each piece.
A brand new dedicated YouTube channel has just been established for my podcast What Now with Simo. You can find it here, with all episodes sorted onto their own season playlists.
At the moment of this writing, the latest two episodes weren’t yet uploaded, due to a minor technical issue I believe my podcast hosting site will fix soon. All the other episodes are already uploaded and available for listening.
I also have another YouTube channel for other types of videos. I do still share the special episodes of the podcast featuring guests there as well. This channel, which will also continue to grow with new works in the future, is here.
On Midsummer 2023 — in Finland, the great festival of summer light and summer nights and hopes and dreams of love and happiness — I decided to make the full sheet music for the culminating section called “Love” from An Iceland Symphony available on this site for free viewing and download. I hope this may help prospective performers, musical organisations and orchestras, discover this piece. You can find it on the Sheet Music page.
My book At Dawn: Early Short Stories just got the most wonderful review on Amazon and Goodreads. The review was written by Nicole Etter, and she also created this beautiful graphic.
I feel extremely fortunate, as very few writers can ever have received such a brilliantly written first review for their first book of fiction. It touched me deeply to read these sensitive and insightful words from this fantastic writer.
With her kind permission, I’ve shared the review also on my site. You can find it on the Writing page and as text only on Amazon and Goodreads. Heartfelt thanks, Nicole!
My second album, Tales from the North, Book I, is now available worldwide for purchase and streaming in 150+ places. See the Music page for more on this album and for a presentation video. You can also watch it on YouTube.
Released my second album of music, Tales from the North, Book I, on Bandcamp. It consists of 12 pieces for two pianos and pianists. This music will also later be published as sheet music, as my own versions are above all a delivery system for introducing this music to the world. See the Music page for more.
Updated the site with hardcover photos of all my books available in that format (as all future ones will also be), replacing or removing most of the paperback images. You can find these new hardcover photos both in logical places on the various subpages and also in the photo galleries at the bottom of many of the pages.
On the 3rd anniversary of my podcast, released the second of the two new episodes of What Now with Simo featuring Pierre Estève. As with our earlier episodes in 2021 (see the Podcast page), all the music in these episodes was composed and performed by Pierre.
Much of it can be bought on Bandcamp, but as a special treat and perfect anniversary gift to me and all listeners, this second part also includes a lot of music so far unreleased on any album, with some of the pieces appearing here for the first time anywhere.
These episodes with Pierre have been an absolute joy for me — the kind of thing I could only dream about when starting my podcast in Iceland back in March 2020. Pierre has always given me a free hand in editing our episodes — though naturally we work closely together to get final results we both feel happy with — and some of the most thrilling moments for me have involved the choices involved in juxtaposing speech and music in ways that add up to something greater than the sum of the parts.
Truly a fascinating process with endless creative potential.
Started season 5 of my podcast What Now with Simo. As with season 4, all episodes of this season will feature some other audio elements than only speech, whether music or environmental sounds or both. In the first episode (5.1: “Nordic Insights, Future Plans, and Past and Present”) these include the ambience of a café, where I had stopped for tea. With this season I also introduced new cover art featuring an image from my upcoming visual art project Sky Mandalas.
Announcing with great pleasure and happiness that with the first of our new episodes with Pierre Estève, my podcast What Now with Simo has just passed 10,000 listens on audio streaming alone. Counting also YouTube listens, this milestone was already passed a little while ago, but now, on Christmas Eve of 2022, the official count on my podcast hosting site for audio-only listens has gone past 10,000. With thanks and appreciation to everyone who has listened — a perfect Christmas gift!
Released the first of the two new episodes of What Now with Simo featuring Pierre Estève. As with our earlier episodes in 2021 (see the Podcast page), all the music in these episodes was composed and performed by Pierre and can be bought on Bandcamp.
Remastered every episode of my podcast and compiled each season so far into YouTube videos (playlist link), giving the early episodes (1.1 to 3.9) the lo-fi treatment they needed — to match my earliest intention of having those episodes be like something you heard from a single-speaker radio, old tape recordings, or even a telephone, perhaps late at night — and the later episodes the best hi-fi stereo quality they called for.
Happily announcing two new episodes of What Now with Simo featuring Pierre Estève and his fantastic music. The background image for this banner is from his beautiful and inspiring Flowers of Change project. You can find our earlier, 2021 episodes here: Part 1 and Part 2.
Published the season 4 finale of my podcast: episode 4.16: “Creative Basics, Visions, and Fog”. In it you can you also hear in fragments parts of an ongoing composition of mine called “In the Fog, Deep”.
Updated the album with two new tracks:
1) My reading of the H. P. Lovecraft poem “The Garden”, as featured in the 2nd anniversary episode of my podcast What Now with Simo. The reading follows the music-only track “Lovecraft’s Garden”.
2) An “Extended Peaks Version” as the last track of the album. This version includes all the repeats as in the episode itself, whereas the album’s opening track, the “Single Peaks Version”, is a condensed take without repeats.
I also made one tweak: shortened the silence at the end of the first track. Other than these changes, everything else remains the same, including the price of the full album. Here is the album link again.
For the amended album blurb, please see the Music page.
Released my first album of music, Passages Dark and Light, on Bandcamp. The album blurb reads:
“Passages Dark and Light is my first album. It consists of the full soundtrack of the 2nd anniversary episode (4.9) of my podcast What Now with Simo.
For this episode I created a more serene version of the theme tune as well as the extended piece ‘Passages Dark and Light’ made up of peaks and valleys. The first track presents a version of this with just the peaks without the meditative guitar valleys.
‘Lovecraft’s Garden’ accompanies in that anniversary episode my reading of H. P. Lovecraft’s poem ‘The Garden’.”
That 2nd anniversary episode is available for example on YouTube.
I recently decided to start uploading all future and earlier episodes of my podcast also to my YouTube channel. This process will take a long time, but the latest two are already up, including the extra long and extra musical 4.9: “2nd Anniversary Special”.
That one is also the first of my episodes to be recorded with my new Shure Super 55 Deluxe microphone, and my voice has never been captured better. If you have a smart TV with a good sound system and capable of accessing the YouTube app, that’s one of the best ways to experience the episodes.
The presentation video for my collection of short stories is now viewable in various places, including this site, my YouTube channel, and the Amazon product page for the hardcover (scroll down there to find it).
Published Art & Love, Vol. 1 as well as my other earlier books as hardcovers. The only ones this doesn’t yet apply to are the two in the Haunted Garden series (until one day the trilogy may be completed).
Started season 4 of podcast What Now with Simo with episode 4.1: “Welcome Aboard, a Look Back, and a Look Forward”.
A special 2-part episode of What Now with Simo coming up featuring composer, sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, sculptor, poet, and adventurer Pierre Estève (you can hear and purchase his music on Bandcamp).
We’ll record our discussion early in the first week of August 2021. Please send in any questions you’d like me to ask him before the evening of Tuesday the 3rd. (See the banner larger at the bottom of the Podcast page.)
An Iceland Symphony, Op. 1 hit #1 on Amazon’s list of Hot New Releases in the category of Opera & Classical Songbooks before I had even made an official announcement about the book’s publication! Waiting for those preview pages to become available on the product pages.
I had the great pleasure of having a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion with actor and writer David Lee Homb — well known to adventure gamers for his role in Sierra’s groundbreaking horror adventure game Phantasmagoria — for a special two-part 1st anniversary episode of What Now with Simo. David has also kindly given permission to include a full transcript of our talk in the next book of transcripts. (See the banner larger at the bottom of the Podcast page.)
Published the book of transcripts for the second season of my podcast What Now with Simo. Available as both a paperback and en ebook. And here is the page for the series on Amazon.
Episode 3.1 of What Now with Simo. Starting with this episode, my journey through the history of recorded music, films, TV, books, comics, and more will be featured regularly, starting with January 1952. An associated playlist of carefully selected items will also get built up on Spotify as I go along.
My podcast What Now with Simo has just passed 5,000 unique listens. This number excludes partial request, bots, and repeat listens. Last episode of season 2 on the way, then the book of transcripts for season 2, and season 3 starting 1 January 2021.
Published Art & Love, Vol. 1 as paperback and ebook. The first in a new series of non-fiction books, a keystone series in my future legacy.
My podcast What Now with Simo is now also on Amazon’s main site. I was one of those they contacted prior to launching their podcasting platform.
My odyssey through the history of recorded music has reached the 1950s, the decade when everything in music blossomed and exploded, including record cover art. From now on I’ll be sharing exceptional and sometimes questionable or ludicrous examples of this art form on Facebook.
For the 100th birthday of one of my very favourite writers, Ray Bradbury, I was invited to record this guest podcast episode for the Cabrera Brothers’ Free Bundle Originals. A very personal introduction to a series that has accompanied me through life at important moments like a dear friend, from childhood to Paris and beyond. Recorded raw, straight from the heart.
I was invited to write this guest blog for the company I translate films and TV series for. I discuss some of the challenges and joys involved, and how this work also feeds into my development as a writer.
My books featured in the Artist Alley for this year’s virtual Finncon — due to the virus, not a physical one this time around. This was my first time being involved as more than a guest.
I joined the Senscape team to work under designer and main writer Agustín Cordes on Asylum, a horror adventure game of epic proportions and quality.
I’ll be contributing writing as well as revising texts under his brilliant direction. I previously worked with Agustín on the free horror adventure game Serena, which was a pleasure from beginning to end.
Published word-for-word transcripts of the first season of my podcast What Now with Simo in book form. Available both as a handsome 6x9-inch paperback and an ebook, and including an introduction and some footnotes.
This is the first in this series of books, which will build up into a library as time passes. A chronicle of my life, thoughts, and daily musings, and a record of my having been here.
I started my podcast What Now with Simo:
“A freeform, wide-ranging podcast on any topics foremost on the host’s mind at the time of recording. Particular favourite topics include creativity and all the arts — music, films, screenplays, fiction, poetry, comics, games, comedy, and everything in between. Messages from listeners welcomed for possible inclusion in an episode. Note that sending a recording for inclusion in an episode of this podcast does indeed implicitly give me permission to do so.”