Cello advisory: avoid Schiphol airport

"The carbon fiber cello. Yes, well," says Perttu Kivilaakso. "I no longer play that one."
Paavo Lötjönen chuckles. "It was..." he makes a V with his hands, "crushed by a large truck. It looked like this."

"It was in pieces," says Perttu.
"Where was that?" Paavo asks.
"Schiphol Airport," says Perttu.
"We have bad luck at Schiphol," says Paavo.

I like cellos, I like carbon, and I like fibers, so my curiosity about carbon fiber cellos is preordained and I have been on a quest to get my hands on one and draw a bow across its strings and see what it feels like and how it sounds.

Being a fan, I already have Apocalyptica tickets. Then I notice on a website that Perttu plays a carbon fiber cello, so I ask his management whether I could meet him while he is in Vienna and interview his cello. I am honest, I tell them it is for a blog. I call it a website, but I give them the URL. I don't get my hopes up. To my surprise, they readily agree.

My next surprise comes when I arrive backstage on the afternoon before the concert and everyone is nice to me. It turns out Eicca Toppinen, the founder of the band, is a big fan of metamorphosism! "We of course all understand it, being intellectuals," he says, shaking my hand.

Actually, I just made that up. He is busy brushing his hair when I arrive. The guy is a walking Wella ad. Talk about hair. They ought to get a shampoo company to sponsor them. Both he and Perttu do the hair thing in concert, the headbanging hair whip thing?

Eicca is busy brushing his hair and the fourth man, the quiet one with dark glasses, the John Entwistle only with cello one, the one whose name isn't on the website, the one I have no pictures of, is practicing classical licks on a cello from the 1700s because, as they tell me later, he has an orchestral audition coming up.

That leaves Perttu Kivilaakso, who happens to be the one I wanted to see in the first place, and Paavo Lötjönen (pronounced "Paavo Lötjönen"). They march into an interview room with three or four of their cellos and a bunch of other shit and we get to work. If you ever happen to be someone who knows very little about rock music and equally little about cellos but have to interview someone about those subjects? I highly recommend these two. They practically interview themselves, in a nice way.

Perttu is a tall, slender young man with some fancy dye work in his hair, black fingernails on his left hand and a can of Red Bull connected to a vein in his arm by IV drip. When he pronounces the word "knife" he doesn't let the letter "K" go to waste.

Paavo is a bit shorter, stockier, athletic, with short black hair and a little thing growing on his chin. Maybe he's more hyper than Perttu, maybe he just got more sleep.

In great detail and in perfect English they tell me more about cellos and their use in heavy metal music than I could have hoped for. I am now an expert. They show me their cellos, they tell me which rosins they use, they explain their pickups and their earplugs and why they use new Chinese cellos.

Basically, new Chinese cellos are cheap. When a baggage truck runs over one at Schiphol Airport, they merely laugh derisively and say, "Schiphol is as hard on cellos as we are." They also use piezo pickups on the bridge of the cello, so the actual sound of the cello played acoustically is not that important, since they don't use microphones. "We use a wireless system so we can move around on stage without tripping over cords," Paavo explains. "We're sitting down at the beginning of the set, but then we start moving around quite a bit."

They display the cellos. "Look," Paavo says, opening the first hard case. "Eicca's is the oldest, it's a few years old." All the varnish is worn off the back, and every corner that can be broken off is. More varnish is worn off the front, where they use sandpaper to remove rosin. Paavo proudly shows me the sandpaper. "We are hard on cellos," he says. They are hard on everything. He showed me the carbon fiber spike on the otherwise wooden cello. "These are good. They are very light, and very strong, but Eicca broke one."

Many of the bows they use are also carbon fiber. "I broke one on stage once," Perttu says. "The luthiers back in Finland said that was impossible, but it wasn't."

They break a lot of strings too. Half the cello strings sold in Finland every year are sold to Apocalyptica. Paavo grins. "The luthiers love us. We give them a lot of business."

They unpack their bows. Perttu takes out a carbon fiber bow that is just shredded. "This is what they look like at the end of the set," he says. They use double bass rosin on their bows for rock songs, and cello rosin on different bows, sometimes wood, for the ballads they play. I get some double bass rosin on my hand somehow. That stuff is like glue. "It is good for the attack," Paavo says. He demonstrates, playing something on the cello. "Wow," I think. "That sounds just like Apocalyptica." Then, you know, duh. He hands me the cello and the bow. I play a little. I sound like shit, but the cello just roars with that sticky rosin. You can practically pluck the strings with it, the attack is just amazing. Sounds a bit rough on the "A" string, but the lower strings just growl.

Paavo opens another case. "We also have a blue cello." They had a sponsor on their German tour, who asked them to paint a cello blue and play a few numbers on it. "I asked all the luthiers I could find, but none of them would paint a cello blue," he says. "Then I asked all the guitar makers I knew, but they all refused. Finally one gave me a number to call." It turned out to be the number of an automotive paint shop. Paavo masked the cello and they sprayed it with car paint. He grinned as he told me the story. "It's a Chinese cello, too. This used to be yours, didn't it?"

Perttu nods. "Yes, the neck was broken off and when we had it repaired it was better than before."

"Where was it broken?" asks Paavo.

"Schiphol," Perttu says. "We've lost three there."

Paavo plays some more and talks about technique. "We play a lot of fifths," he said, demonstrating. "so it looks like we have bad technique, but for fifths you have to play like this." He holds his fingers flat across the strings and plays two at a time.

Their bowing technique is different, too, with a stiffer wrist. "if you have a relaxed wrist, your arm gets very tired by the end of a set."

Perttu shows me the bridge on one of the cellos. It has a slightly different shape than an average cello bridge. "The A string must be closer to the fingerboard, and the other strings a bit higher, because of how we play."

Paavo takes out some yellow foam things and explains how they work. They are ear plugs and earphones at the same time, allowing them to hear themselves and cutting out noise at the same time. "It is the only way to play in tune," he explains. "And I have no problem with tinnitus." The sound engineer can adjust the volume and "location" of all the musicians. "In the earphones, Eicca is on my right, Perttu is on my left, the drums are behind me and all the other stuff we have on tape is about here." He waves his hands above and behind his head.

They tell me they no longer take their cellos into the cabin when they fly. After spending about $100,000 buying tickets for their instruments, they decided it would be cheaper to put them in baggage and replace the ones that break. "It's a big savings," Paavo says.

"As long as we avoid Schiphol," Perttu says.

Finally my time runs out. As they pack everything up, Paavo and Perttu say they like to play classical music when they're not on tour. They're all classically trained. Perttu, the son of a cellist, plays in the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Paavo, whose parents are both musicians, plays somewhere else. Listen, between you and me, by this time I was getting tired and frankly wasn't paying close attention anymore. Overall, though, you have to admit I did pretty good with the quotes for not recording anything and not taking any notes.

When you're playing a cello, Perttu tells me, the most important thing, more important than the sound of the cello, he says, is the sound in your head you're trying to produce. He says he tries to replicate the human voice. He's a big opera fan.

I take a few pictures of them. The woman in charge of publicity comes in to drag them to their next interview and I ask her to take a picture. Eicca walks by outside and I ask him to come in for a group picture, which he does. His hair looks great.

He asks me if I'm coming to the concert tonight. I tell him I am. "Wear earplugs," he says.

Perttu, me, Paavo, Eicca.

More on the concert in a while.

Many thanks to various people. Thanks to Novala, thanks to Joe, thanks to Anne and Francis, and special thanks to Aikku for making me an MP3 demonstrating the correct pronunciation of the band members' names.