History

Astral Sleep are a band, that writes and performes music that can't be easily described. Having influences from doom metal, heavy metal and progressive rock, musical background from death and thrash metal and musical interests in jazz, classical and black metal, Astral Sleep forms into a combination, that has a little bit of something for everyone, but in all nothing for no one.

2004-2005 - The Beginning:

Astral Sleep was found in the summer of 2004 when Markus Heinonen wanted a band for himself when his former band was so inactive.

Markus asked his old friend and playing mate Rolle Heinonen to start a new group. Since all good drummers are so hard to find, at first Markus handled the drum section and vocals. Thinking about live performing and how little can a trio handle on stage, Markus wanted the band to play doom metal since he had heard about the inactive but hypnotic stage performing of an old Finnish doom band Unholy.

Markus asked his other old playing mate Jaakko Oksanen to join in. Markus, Rolle and Jaakko had played together earlier, in the year 2002, so this cooperation was not new to the three. They had 3 songs (their length varied from 4 minutes to 15 minutes) to play on the rehearsals, but they didn't rehearse much. The project became more serious when Markus and Rolle played some old children tunes on the rehearses, and Markus started asking for gigs for the band. It didn't take much time when the band got their first gig on Kauksurock 2005.

Then Markus started playing other guitar, and Rolle's little brother took the place behind the drums, at least for that gig.

2005-2006 - Giving birth to the first bastard:

After summer 2005, with very little band activity and much to think about the recording process of the first demo, Astral Sleep finally got the process started at 08.09.2005 when Markus entered the house of his long-time playing mate and friend Rolf Pilve (the drummer of Dreamtale and Sightless [also Jaakko's other band]) to record the drum tracks for the demo. It took lots of filmed documentary videoclips, time (2 months), beer, experimenting, metal and madness to complete and mix even decent sounding drums, basses and guitars. The pressure was growing. After some time and more work, all the instruments were mixed and mastered sounding the way they are now. The whole editing process of the first demo was over in 19.11.2005. The result was maybe not the best ever, but it's good enough to present the sound of music by Astral Sleep. As the demo is finally finished, the band can move on composing new songs, rehearsing and getting prepared for gigs. Only time shall tell how much the first self-titled demo really means in the bands history.

2006-2007 - The making of 'Unawakening':

After the release of self-titled demo, we mostly studied the reviews that it got. Most reviewed it pretty average, but fortunately there were some who thought it was a masterpiece! However, some new material had been coming up for a while and in the spring of 2006, 5 new songs were ready. The band had very much of a consern, which of these tracks would end up to the next demo. After a lot's of thoughts and crazy ideas, one stood stronger than the others: To record a full lenght album.

This would mean many times more pain, tears and mental sickness than recording a demo, since all the equipment were very poor and none of the members had much experience in album recording. But it didn't matter. It had to be done, using mostly same methods as in the demo. This time, there were no limits on anything, time being the least of them.

But there was another problem: Who would play the drums? The solution was not too hard: Tommi Häyrynen, an old friend of Markus agreed to the task after hearing the material. The full band had couple of rehearsals in summer.

Anyhow, there still was problems, the greatest of them being the method of recording the drums. Since the first demo was recorded using one microphone for the whole drumkit, the same method would not work on an album that should sound as much studio produced as possible.

But in the autumn, band was in a hurry. There were no signs of drumtracks, so the album had to be done the Astral Sleep way. In 15.08.2006 Markus started recording the guitar tracks for the first album. A little later Jaakko's bass and Rolle's guitars were also recorded over a digitally created clumsy drumtracks.

In 25.09.2006, the debut demo was released on tape by Portuguese label Bubonic Productions. There was only 150 handnumbred pieces put out.

The progress was slow, and the next steps were executed in November 2006, when Markus moved to his first own apartment, which living room served as the recording space of the drums. Tommi, the friend of Markus came over one weekend to record the drums using an electronic drumkit owned by Rolf Pilve, who played the drums on the first demo. Once again Rolf was a great help, thanks!

Some additional solos and interludes were done during the spring of 2007, until Markus moved to another town, 150 kilometres away from Tampere. This fact did not slow down the sluggish process. The only thing left on the album were the vocals and the mixing, which required many kilometres travel for Jaakko (who took care over 60% of the mixing process) and some for Markus too.

The vocals were a very hard piece for Markus, since his experience did not match the requirements of the epic album. In fact the vocals had already been recorded two or three times for the whole album, but one final vocal recording session in the "new living room" defined the final vocal sound of the album.

Before the vocal recording session, Markus had decided to invest on real studio monitors instead of simple computer stereos. After these hardcore monitors had arrived, Markus and Jaakko took many serious multiple day sessions mixing the album. In 8.9.2007, the first album 'Unawakening' was finished.

2008-2010 - The making of 'Angel':

When the debut album 'Unawakening' was released (by Russian label Solitude Productions, in 21.09.2008), it received contradictious welcome among the media. Some referred it to loads of crap/vomit, but some wrote that it was a masterpiece. We were not completely satisfied with the album, for various of reasons. First of all we did not have the skills to mix it professionally, so the album was mixed by Solitude Productions, but they changed some artistic facts about the album for the sake to make it sound more professional. Second thing was that the songs were not fully composed to maximum performance, and there were too many intros/interludes/outros. Despite these facts, 'Unawakening' was a great album and we are still on this date amazed by the visionary compositions it carried with it. We are still playing some tracks from 'Unawakening' live, not because of lack of material, but because the songs sound great played with the skills we have today.

06.06.2008 Astral Sleep entered D-Studio in Klaukkala, Finland to record a mini album. The songs were written in very short period of time, each founding member (Markus, Jaakkko & Rolle) writing one track of their own. There were two main reasons to do this album quickly. First reason was to introduce the playing of our first fulltime drummer, Jiri Pyörälä, on record. The second reason was to have an album that would be ready to be released once the band would go back active. Astral Sleep was on a one year break during the time when Markus and Jaakko completed their mandatory service in the Finnish Army.

13.09.2010 was the date, when mini-album 'Angel' was released by Solitude Productions.

The first two gigs were held on autumn 2009 in small clubs in Helsinki, Finland, called Heavy Corner and Lepakkomies, alongside with great Finnish bands Colosseum and Saattue.

(source: the official Astral Sleep website, November 2011)
(discography incomplete)