MUSICALYPSE - 2015 and Beyond!

To all our readers out there,

For anyone who’s been following this site over the years, you’ve probably noticed some changes. I’d like to take a moment to fill you in on what’s been happening with the site for the last five years or so – how it all began, what happened, and what the future looks like.

Musicalypse was founded some years ago by Jana Blomqvist and Cornelia Wickel, a couple of photographers who met on DeviantArt. Even though they didn’t exactly have the same taste in music, they ended up shooting a lot of the same bands and it turned out that they had similar ideas about photography and what a good quality concert shot should look like. Soon afterward, they discovered that they were both thinking about starting a website to post full reports from their shows and realized that it would be even better if they combined their efforts. There were two journalists who came on board immediately: Tanja Caciur and Victoria Maksimovic, whose names you’ll see on most of the reports starting from the site’s launch. There have been some guest photographers and writers from around Germany and Poland as well, who have come and gone from time to time.

But of course, as life goes on, things change. Cornelia, Tanja, and Victoria had to start focusing on their day jobs and didn’t have as much time to go to concerts. Jana got involved with Rumba and Kaaoszine, and since they wanted exclusive shots, she wasn’t able to update Musicalypse as actively as she once had. In the end, around 2010-2011, most of the girls were too busy with other things to keep the site going. Tanja kept us up-to-date with some festivals and whatnot, but for the most part, the site just stopped updating.

I stepped in at the end of 2012 to try my hand at writing reviews. I had been writing them for my own purposes for a while and Jana thought to give me a shot at writing for the site since no one else was around anymore to give the site content, and it was a shame to let something die that they had put so much time and effort into. My first show was Sabaton at The Circus at the end of 2012, and as you’ve hopefully noticed, I’ve been trying to keep the content somewhat consistent ever since.

But it was just me, and it’s hard to motivate yourself to work on a website when you’re on your own. I’ve been producing a fairly steady output of reviews since 2013 when I came on officially, but I just couldn’t find the time to put more effort in than that. I love writing album reviews, for example, but when I wasn’t motivated by anyone’s management, I couldn’t really be bothered. I’m a university student and I have a lot going on. Cornelia and Jana are still involved, the former acting as our content manager and the latter still shooting the occasional festival or club show from time to time. But in the end, it’s not a lot. Though my taste in music is pretty diverse, you won’t be seeing many (or any) black metal or thrash reviews from me because it’s not my thing.

Last year, I invited an old acquaintance to shoot the occasional gig, since she spends most of her time in the northern parts of the country, so between us we were able to cover more shows and festivals. Lene L. has been photographing gigs around Tampere and Seinäjoki for the last year or so for us as a guest photographer.

With only one person actively writing and one guest photographer, it might not seem like the site has a great prognosis for the future. However, Lene recently asked if she could interview one of the members of Arion, and as I hope you’ve seen, she did an absolutely phenomenal job of it. I also hope you’ve been enjoying her photography because after the interview, I asked her if she wanted to join on as the head photographer, and she accepted. This means the site is no longer being held up by my shoulders alone. I’m very excited to have her on board.

So what is in store for 2015 then? Lene and I are going to try and get more involved in the music scene and hopefully get the site more active again! This year we’d like to be able to update the site a bit, but mainly, we’re hoping to get things going again:
On our FACEBOOK page, we’re trying to stay up-to-date with new releases!
Our TWITTER account has been reactivated as well, which Lene is taking over!
I’ve also been working on reorganizing the PHOTO GALLERY as well, to arrange songs by year instead of alphabetically, and to separate and group festivals together (though there have been a few bugs we need to deal with).
Cornelia added a REVIEWS section for albums and yearly summaries. We’ll also try to make sure the Reports & Interviews section is kept more up-to-date.
And lastly, we’re going to try and do more album reviews and interviews again! In case you’ve missed them, you can check out our interviews with THE BEARDS and IIVO KAIPAINEN from ARION, and stay tuned in the next week or so for DEVIN TOWNSEND!

The future is looking bright for Musicalypse, and who knows, if the next year goes well, we might ask if any of you want to join the team to help bring Musicalypse back!