At the same time his friend from school, Tero, started reviving his initial drumming skills, and soon they started practising together. From these times there are endless piles of tapes, and more "songs"  than anyone would even want to remember, but as Jari started playing from scratch, most of these are just practise pieces, some of them not amounting to more than strange chord acrobatics. Evaluations like "weird inward bound progressive rock" are probably associated with these times.

What started as two people practising to play, after the first 6-8 months expanded into a trio as Antti Korhonen, known from numerous Kouvola based indie-bands like Dry Circus and (a temporary lineup of) Lintuherra Heiskanen, joined as a bassist. While this was useful practise for the two beginning players, Antti was really too skilled at this point. This resulted in his waning interest as the next winter passed on.

The next autumn Marko Kujala joined as the new bassist, except that he'd never really played an instrument. It seemed like a good idea to have people who start from nothing, without preconceptions (or knowledge of theory) of what playing an instrument is, as this would possibly result to a new approach. On the other hand teaching Marko to play anything took another year.

The following year also Juha Lintula joined, originally, if anyone can remember anymore, he was supposed to come to sing and possibly play second guitar. Not being comfortable with this he ended up playing bass and Marko moved to singing. How all this came about is anybody's guess, and it certainly didn't speed things up as Marko now had to start learning to sing.

Now for the first time, the band had a vocalist, unfortunately the songs required much more than the single-pitched-yelling that Marko had been doing in some project years earlier. Marko never really managed the new position, and also Juha's interests lied in his other projects (with the fact that being actually a metal-oriented solo guitarist doesn't really make it any easier to suddenly be content with the role of a bassist). This resulted to a curious falling out next spring as Juha and Marko "resigned" without telling Jari, who in turn, irritated, though later realising it was pretty much what he'd wished for, had to have his say. Yet another beutifully handled human relationship...

The changes always seem to come in the autumn, but the next one was more of a de ja vu. Mika Hannula was the next bassist-to-be, again someone starting from no previous knowledge. However, this time things didn't get quite as far before both sides realised that they didn't really have the time required. in addition at this stage Mika would've had to do a lot of catching up very quickly.

What all this amounts to is that Pestida have been a two piece group every time in between the changes. It also brought about Jari's attempts to start singing as no one else seemed to take the position. Having always been the one to write most of the music, all of the lyrics and arrange them with the music, this seemed a natural position. The spring of 2000 Jari and Tero finally started to manouvre the production of the CD as it seemed that this was the only way to get things done.

As vacations started so did the initial recordings for the CD. Because everything was done at home, setting up the equipment and learning recording while doing it, it took until the end of the year to finish the four songs. However,   this was due mainly to the fact that after maybe two more intensive weeks during the summer (and even most of that time was plagued by equipment problems as recording hard drives crashed and input devices refused to cooperate) - the recordings took place approximately once a month for one day. This was because of Jari's workload at the university and Tero's at his his school.

In addition, the fact that Jari now had to play all the guitars, bass, and do the singing, didn't speed things up. There was some help on Fireflies' basslick by Juha, who was called in partly because it was felt that he should play it as he was the one to originally come up with it, and parly because no one else remembered how it went. The other collaboration was with a friend, Roxanne Giannou, who did the vocals in Greece in a peculiar way; listening the music from a cd and singing into a minidisc, whose contents was then taken to Finland and added to the track. Later it turned out that this was not as unproblematic as it first seemed, and resulted to a lot of "cutting and pasting" from several takes.

The songs were slowly pieced together, finally assembled, which would really be the most accurate expression to use, right before the end of the year as Jari had finally come up with a reasonable performance of rest of the vocals. The artwork for the covers of the cd was completed on the last days of the year and printed (although no one was really satisfied with the slightly too pale black), as well as the CDs finally burned.

At the same time of this there was yet another change/addition in Pestida's lineup as Iina Salmelin joined in as a bassist.

Currently (April 2001), however, Pestida is dispatched due to Jari's short university exchange to Glasgow, Scotland, lasting until the end of June. At the same time Pestida are looking for comments on their demo CD, and possibly also interested record companies... as well as listening to early morning trucks scuttling down the streets of several cities 6 am in the morning while the pale blue dawns press down on the curbsides...

(October 2001) Jari returned from Glasgow in early July, and from there on the "biography" continues in the "news" section...