TARJA TURUNEN (ex-NIGHTWISH) has issued the following update:

"I arrived in LA few days ago. It’s a wonderful spring here and the sun is shining. It was tough in the dark Finland in the last weeks, so I was already starting to miss the sea and the sun. The least I am going to miss is the snow work.

This trip is not a holiday trip though. I am working with Jim, Slamm and Bart at Remote Control Studios again. We are getting the orchestra arrangements ready and we are starting to discuss the mixing process with Slamm. He is going to be the one to mix all the orchestral tracks. Other mixing engineers will mix the rock/heavy tracks, but I’ll tell you more about that later.

On these days, I hope to meet Mel Wesson as well who was working with the ambient music design on my first album.

The progress of the album is going smoothly but steadily ahead. I have realized during this last month that some of the songs that I thought were not the strongest ones during the writing process turned out to be really good songs now when everything has been recorded. I will definitely have some trouble in choosing the ones that are going to end in the actual album. I guess it’s a nice problem though.

The vocal recordings will continue pretty soon after this LA trip.

Now I would like to tell you something that has been on my mind for some time already. Usually I am not interested in giving my opinions and comments about things that are outside of music and my career, but this time the happenings around just touched me deeply.

There was just a while ago a terrible earthquake in Haiti, followed by other one in Japan and later on in Chile and more recently in Turkey.

It’s just so unbelievable to think all the suffering and trouble that people need to go through in their lives. I am truly speechless and sad. Except for Haiti, I have been in the other countries were I have met lovely people. Is difficult to think that some of them or their families might have been reached by the horrible situation. I am just having them in my thoughts. I send them all my humble and honest love and prayers.

This is the sad reminder for all of us to live our lives as best as we can every day, so that when it’s our time to go, we die alive.

You will never know what is waiting for you tomorrow, so today is the day to cherish."

Tarja Turunen is detailing work on her forthcoming new album, What Lies Beneath, on her official blog at Tarja-whatliesbeneath.com. Further updates to follow.