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 H