This Is How Alexi Laiho And Jaska Raatikainen Did IneartheD’s Ubiquitous Absence of Remission Demo

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Thursday evening on July 6 1995 two enthusiastic 15 and 16 year old teenage dudes had travelled 230 km from Espoo to knock on the door of a basement of a church. These young metalheads were guitarist/vocalist Alexi Laiho and drummer Jaska Raatikainen. They’d arrived in Astia-studio’s first location in Lappeenranta to make the second demo of their band, IneartheD. This would start almost 10 years of close collaboration with a band that would later be known as Children of Bodom and music producer/engineer Anssi Kippo. This is how Alexi Laiho and Jaska Raatikainen did IneartheD’s Ubiquitous Absence of Remission demo.

You should read this article if you want to learn details about a studio session that Alexi and Jaska did before Children of Bodom. Niina Keitel and Jaska Raatikainen have kindly contributed their comments to this blog post.

I remember a concrete bunker space where there was no separate control room for the sound engineer. I didn’t think this was anything unusual, as I had no experience of studios yet. But we got the demo done and were happy with the result.
–Jaska Raatikainen, drums

Have you read:
5 Peculiar Facts About The Recording of Children of Bodom’s Hate Me! Single

This Is How Alexi Laiho And Jaska Raatikainen Did IneartheD’s Ubiquitous Absence of Remission Demo

When the recording studio I was running turned 30 in December 2024, I bumped into a bunch of diaries from my early sessions and reading them gave the inspiration to write this article. We had reserved three days to make the Ubiquitous Absence of Remission demo, and even then – just as today – loading the gear in and completing soundcheck was done on the evening before. We spent three hours on it.

It was really just me and Alexi who went to record the demo, because no one else in the band could make it or there were no other people in the band. We stayed at my grandparents, who lived quite close to the studio, so in that sense too the location was good. And then there was also Niina Keitel. 🥰
–Jaska Raatikainen, drums

According to my notes, the activities on the evening of arrival included, surprisingly enough, ‘fixing the guitar’. Unfortunately I no longer remember what was wrong with Alexi’s guitar. But I do remember very well how from the first moment we met, we were united by an odd coincidence: we both had a black Ibanez RG550 guitar.

I recall how a few years later Alexi was dreaming of throwing the guitar around his neck on stage. Yet, he didn’t want to risk damaging his favourite guitar. I brought mine to one of the early Tavastia Club gigs, and Alexi very successfully did a guitar flip at the end of the show.

This I remember. Alexi was practicing it in the studio or backstage, and managed to make a stunning stage move at one of the most important venues for us. What I didn’t remember was that it was done on Anssi’s guitar.
–Jaska Raatikainen, drums

Just two years later, the same duo arrived at Astia-studio to work on the full-length that would be known as the debut album of Children of Bodom, Something Wild. The progress between the two releases is huge, but let’s go back to the making of IneartheD’s second demo.

Have you read:
5 Things You Didn’t Know About Children of Bodom’s Something Wild Album

The recording equipment

This was either the 48th or 49th session that was done at Astia-studio. The recording equipment at the time consisted of a Roland M24E mixing console, a Fostex R8 reel-to-reel 8-track recorder and an Alesis Adat recorder. I had synchronized the recorders with the JL Cooper dataMaster synchronizer. One track on the R8 was for the SMPTE timecode, so we had a whopping 15 tracks. The reverb/delay was an ART multi-effect for guitar and the only compressor was an Alesis 3630 which was used on the Something Wild debut as well.

I recorded the drums on eight tracks of the Adat recorder. The drum tracks were:

1. Bass drum
2. Snare
3. Tom 1
4. Tom 2
5. Tom 3
6. Tom 4
7. Overhead right
8. Overhead left

The remaining instruments: bass, guitars, keyboards and vocals were captured on a Fostex R8 tape machine.

The first studio day

On Friday 7 July we started at 11 am and spent half an hour warming up. We recorded drums and guitar at the same time for all three songs. Two versions of Shamed were recorded and the latter ended up on the demo. Once the basic tracks were done, we continued with the second guitar track. The live guitar on the Shamed song was re-recorded.

After an hour-long lunch break, we resumed with the guitars. Once they were completed Alexi started playing the bass. We made a quick visit to a local music shop, Finn-music Ltd. The rest of the day was spent recording the bass along with both electric and acoustic guitar. We finished at 9 pm and had worked 8.5 hours.

The second studio day

On Saturday, we exceptionally started already at 9.30 am. First we listened to the previous day’s recordings and then started to tweak the keyboard arrangements together. It was endearing to watch how Alexi played the right and Jaska the left hand parts at the same time on the same keyboard. At 1 pm we had a lunch break, during which I went to do a soundcheck for the evening’s gig.

I think the keyboard parts came ex tempore in the studio, just because there was a keyboard there. I remember very well how Alexi and I played the same keyboard together. A brief arrangement, rehearsal and hit it on tape. Bravo!
–Jaska Raatikainen, drums, keyboards

We continued recording at 3.30 pm, when my friend, Ms Niina Keitel, arrived to sing the melodic vocal parts of Translucent Image. Niina and I were singing in the same choir at the time. On the previous day Alexi had mentioned about his vision to have female vocals on one of the songs. So I called Niina and asked her to help us out.

It was an easy and effortless session. When I arrived in Astia, they handed me a written sheet of the vocal melody, and we recorded the parts. Jaska and Alexi seemed to know exactly what they wanted, both in terms of atmosphere and vocal use. I was also impressed by their technical skills and the complexity of the music. For example, polyrhythm was something that I hadn’t heard before in this style of music.

–Niina Keitel, singer

We then continued with the keyboards and finished already at 6 pm. I was playing wedding party gigs at the time and after the six-hour studio day, I headed to the gig and the boys got the evening off.

The third studio day

On Sunday, we started working on the additional guitars at midday. Once they were completed it was time for Alexi’s vocals and solo guitar. In the afternoon we had a one hour lunch break, after which we recorded a solo on nylon-string acoustic guitar along with a cymbal crescendo on mallets (soft-headed sticks) for Possessed.

At the end of the same song, Alexi played a synth pattern on my guitar. I had acquired at the time a rather rare Korg guitar synth and installed it on my Ibanez RG550. Alexi was delighted to be able to play the tricky pattern on guitar instead of the synth.

Now that you mentioned, I do remember this. It was fun and cool that Anssi took a role in these things. It opened up all sorts of new worlds that we hadn’t really thought about.
–Jaska Raatikainen, drums

My studio diary entries show that the rest of the evening was spent on preparing, mixing and making both master tape and listening cassette copies. It also says that in the middle of mixing I’d also fixed Heini’s cello – why and how, that I cannot recall. The day, and the session, was wrapped up at 10.30 pm, so the third studio day lasted 9.5 hours. We spent a total of 27 hours recording and mixing the three songs.

Listen to Jaska tell us how the recording of Ubiquitous Absence of Remission went:

IneartheD: Ubiquitous Absence of Remission

Ubiquitous Absence of Remission was the last session in the first location of the Astia-studio; the basement of a church. After that, I moved the operation to an old building in the heart of my hometown, where I made, among others, IneartheD’s next demo the Shining that too had Ms Niina Keitel on vocals. We also did the same band’s debut album Something Wild, after which they changed their name to Children of Bodom, and the drum, bass, guitar and vocal recordings of the Hatebreeder album.

As the previous session had been pleasant, I was happy to join them again. I also remember that later I was approached by Inearthed – or probably they were already Children of Bodom – asking if I would like to sing at their gig at Tavastia Club in Helsinki. Unfortunately, the schedules didn’t coincide, so the live gig remained a dream.
–Niina Keitel, singer

The move from the basement to the new premises took just three days and on the following Friday it was time for the first session at the second location.

Ubiquitous Absence of Remission contains the following tracks:

1. Intro 1:37
2. Translucent Image 4:05
3. Possessed 5:02
4. Shamed 5:04

The music was composed by Alexi Laiho and the lyrics were written by the band’s bassist, Samuli Miettinen. Together with Jaska Raatikainen, those three were the founding members of IneartheD. Niina Keitel had been given a nickname on the cover of the demo: “the best singer on earth”. Did you know that she later became a famous opera singer who has toured the world performing on opera stages? According to Operabase, she is “one of the most successful Finnish mezzo-sopranos of our time.”

I listened to the original cassette tape of Ubiquitous and it was a stunning nostalgia triptych. Despite the low growling, every now and then Alexi shows off a more familiar vocal expression in the style of the later recordings. From both the riffs as well as the drum patterns, you can hear surprisingly strong shades of what was to come.

It was nice to notice that Alexi had used some of Translucent Image’s riffs on Sinergy’s Beware the Heavens, for example. And there are several tracks with vocal delay repeats familiar from later Bodom recordings. In the demo, I created them with an ART guitar multi-effect.

I think the intro was my idea. I had copied it from a PC 286 to a compact cassette. This was because my neighbour was a coder, and he showed me this Second Reality animation. I think that demo won an animation competition at some computer fair.
–Jaska Raatikainen, drums

According to Wikipedia (in Finnish only), the intro to the demo is from an early Finnish demo group, Future Crew‘s PC demo called Second Reality. It placed first in the PC demo competition at the 1993 Assembly event.

Have you read:
5 Interesting Facts That You Haven’t Heard Before About Children of Bodom’s Hatebreeder Album

IneartheD, Children of Bodom and Astia-studio

This was the first of around 20 studio sessions that the band known as IneartheD and later Children of Bodom did with me at Astia-studio. I vividly remember thinking while recording the Ubiquitous Absence of Remission demo, how cool it would be to do more sessions like this. Sometimes a humble wish can come true!

A heartfelt thank you for reading about the demo I worked on with Alexi Laiho and Jaska Raatikainen in the summer of 1995. Please share this article on social media so that as many people as possible can get to know these interesting facts. Also leave a comment below and tell us what you think about the Ubiquitous Absence of Remission demo.

Did you know that all IneartheD demos and Children of Bodom’s first three albums, including singles and cover versions from the same era, were recorded on magnetic tape instead of computer? When you want the same kind of energy and production as on Bodom’s early albums, you are warmly welcome to a reel-to-reel session with me at Astia-studios. Book a studio session here. Have a great week and all the best!

Astia-studio is a full analog recording studio located in Finland with over 30 years of experience. Bands and artists from all over the world including USA and the furthest corner of Russia, Vladivostok have arrived to us for tape recording sessions.

Read more Children of Bodom related posts:

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Children Of Bodom’s Something Wild album

18 Facts About The Recording Of Children Of Bodom’s Hate Crew Deathroll Album

5 peculiar facts about the recording of Children of Bodom’s Hate Me! single