Music/Memory/Memoir (edited by Robert Edgar et al) Dr Kimi Kärki Research Fellow Cultural History & International Institute for Popular Culture (IIPC) University of Turku, Finland Email
[email protected] Phone +358 505344697 Confessions of Metal and Folk: Remembering and Contextualising the Creative Process I know that I've been here before And I swear, sometimes you were with me In different times we witnessed places Returning there I'll always find you (Lord Vicar: ’Accidents’, Gates of Flesh 2016) I am an academic with a serious professional relationship to music, both as a researcher and a musician. I wrote my Cultural History PhD (Kärki 2014) on stage designing in arena and stadium environments, trying to capture a cultural history of technological and theatrical change of high end music performance from 1965 to 2013. In this research I was partially relying on first hand performance experience on both small and big stages, and the related music technology. But the link between my academic and artistic careers is deeper than that, as I have knowingly mixed my studies and creative process, in order to find new angles to both. I started this chapter with a lyric fragment from a song I wrote back in 2015. 1 ‘Accidents’ is a heavy metal song, but the song narrative is removed from the most usual cliches – but also a great narrative tradition – of the genre, such as battles, graveyards, evil, death, and destruction. Instead, it is an introspection on how people meet and fall in love, and how that feels both accidental and yet sometimes premeditated.