NORTHER bassist Jukka Koskinen and drummer Heikki Saari have issued a complete report of their Canadian tourthrough ShutterBLAST.net, which took place back in September. Following is an excerpt:

"It was 3:32 AM when I found myself in a cab on my way to our rehearsal room and made my first notes to our tour diary-to-be. Our bassist Jukka and myself used the cab to collect all our gear from the rehearsal room. We continued to the airport via Kride's place, to pick him up and Petri and Tuomas arrived with separate cabs.

Everyone felt more or less fine, apart from the early wake-up at 3 in the morning. We got ourselves in the plane to Amsterdam, then to Detroit and again to Montreal. A total of 26 hours to Canada.

The next day started a bit better than the previous ended. We had some good sleep, and went to a place to have a good healthy breakfast.

After today's hotel check-in we went to meet Nefastus Dies, our opening band on this tour, at their rehearsal room. We stayed there for an hour, until the drums came in from Pearl. I checked everything with the Pearl delivery guy and everything was as my rider indicated, so we were ready for the tour! :)

The first show of the tour at Trash Bar went really well. The venue was filled, and since, it was a very small place, it was very intimate since the stage was on the floor level. Already during our sound check the support band members started a moshpit and when we started playing it was something disastrous but in a positive way! Playing in a small places like The Trash Bar is always a good change to have a very close feeling with the audience.

Next we played at a venue in Montreal called National. The place is an old theatre and has been operating as a club for sometime now. National has a capacity of over 600 people. The day started nicely until Kride decided to eat sardines which caused such a stink so huge after opening the can that we had to throw ourselves out from our backstage. Thank you Kride for being a fish lover! After a few hours of gagging and gasping for air we were able to go on stage. This time the stage was A LOT bigger than at the Trash Bar, so we actually could fit in, the band could move around and have fun, and I could set up the kit the way I wanted it to. :)

After the show we had to hurry a little to pack all our stuff and get out from the venue, since we had a long travel the next day and an early wake-up. So, we got out of the venue and found out that we had a little hotel-booking-mishap. The problem was that we didn’t actually have a hotel at all because of our unprofessional organizer! We spent about two hours driving around Montreal looking for a hotel with free rooms. We found one, slept… Did we sleep that night? Hmmm maybe..."

Go to this location for the complete report.