Astray
Interview by Negru (December 2002 - Negura #4).




Salut Markku! How are the things going on for you and Astray? Was 2002 a good year for you?
Markku: Morjens! The things are going pretty fine at the moment, thanks for asking! With Astray, we’re currently spreading around Promo 2002 that we released in October last year and trying to find some good label to get interested in releasing our debut album. Besides promotion, I’m also preparing myself to go back to studio in February or March. We have planned to finish the last recordings (some guitar solos and keyboards) for the album then and will probably do some mixing as well, at least some kind of rough mixes from the rest of the six songs that are not included in Promo 2002. The last year was not the best one for Astray, we faced a lot of different kind of adversities and because of them, we had to delay studio recordings over and over again. In fact the whole album was originally planned to be recorded completely more than a year ago, but shit happens… For me personally, a year 2002 was not too bad after all because I graduated from school, moved to “better” city to live and got a new job. So, some nice things happened, but of course the last year had its bad moments as well.
VESA: For me as a member of Astray the year 2002 was remarkable because during that year I finally completed the lyrical wholeness of the Project Earth - DeathCult Ritual which had been tormenting my mind for years. And now the new stuff that Markku had composed made possible to complete the whole case which will be materialized in form of a full length album.

Could you present us a bit Astray, your history, releases, things you feel important…?
Vesa: Astray was formed to serve these primitive needs inside of us and to channel them into form that's possible to be understood by some people. Not all, but some.
Markku: The band was found on spring ’98 and the first release was self financed MCD Until I’m Cold Enough which was released in ’99 and spread about 1100 copies. The second release was digipack MCD Alone and it was released in ’00 by Beyond… Prod.

I first got in contact with your music through the Until I'm Cold Enough MCD. What can you tell us about it? How do you see your present music compared with what you did back then? And who was that nice girl from the cover? I'd say you could have easily expected some nice Finnish Gothic music on the CD after looking at the cover…
Vesa: It's the same diabolical obsession driving us now, that was driving us back then. Now I feel the black blood spread even deeper in my body and soul and I believe same goes with everything under everything that Astray presents. The main thing is that we know now better how to express our agonized souls and we are more skilful and capable to do it.
Markku: A girl in the cover is my old friend Katja, who appears also in the cover of second MCD. I just asked if she could pose in our debut MCD cover and she was interested, so we spent a nice long day in frosty forests and shot the pictures. Later we decided to include her picture also in the cover of Alone because it fit so well to the theme of it. Well, I think our present music is more original and varying compared to our previous MCD’s, and I would say that everything is done more skilful and mature way now than back then, just natural development.

What can you tell us about your most recent material? I listen just to the 3 tracks of the promo, and they seem quite different with eachother… How's the rest? What can you say about the lyrical dimension of the music?
Markku: About the musical side, every song in the album is pretty different with each other, but the main elements -hate and depression- are present in every song to bind the album consistent. My original idea was to compose an album which has very deep changes from totally different mood to another (like my mind usually does), to mix together many kind of feelings. Also I wanted that every single song is like a short independent “chapter”, different to each others, but when putting all the chapters together, the result is many-sided but consistent entirety. I think it succeeded pretty well with the help of Vesa’s great and many-sided lyrical and vocalic expression. We picked those three songs for the promo because we thought they could give pretty good over-all impression of the album. But I must tell you that the most depressive, the most “beautiful” and the most aggressive parts are still in the other songs… For example, the 7th track of the album is gloomy (almost non-metal) instrumental song, while the closing 9th track is the most aggressive one.
Vesa: About the lyrics... My ultimate goal is to tell the absolute truth. This is of course (fortunately) something that will be never reached because of the reasons we all know. So I just let the Devil in me lead my pen and see what appears on the paper. I try to avoid of making some personal propaganda because preaching is not my goal but subconsciously I am probably guilty for doing that. As I said preaching is not my goal, my goal is to tell. I find Human behaviour very interesting topic in all its weakness and foolishness. Human kind is a dying joker, that's a part of the picture I'm trying to build with the lyrics.

Why do you think you're unable to easily find a good label to release your materials? How do you feel seeing poor quality music aggressively promoted by big labels?
Vesa: I guess we're just making that kind of music you can't afford a lot of money with.
Markku: I think that at least the facts such as we are so unknown band and not able to play live shows makes harder to get interested by good labels. And of course it’s always difficult for unknown band to be noticed by labels in the middle of thousands of other bands and demos. About the other topic, to be honest it’s sometimes really surprising to see some shitty band signed on a big label with massive promotions etc. but well, maybe those bands have just “something” in their music that I just don’t understand.

There are only two members in the band. How did you meet and how do you get along with eachother?
Vesa: I think it was something like 1995 when I got on my hands a flyer of Markku's distro list and I ordered a demo of a band called Inearthed (nowadays Children Of Bodom) and somehow we started tape trading. I was going down with my band at the time and Markku sent me some material he had made all alone. As a vocalist and a lyricist I got immediately interested of Markku's stuff and I wrote some lyrics for those tunes and send them to Markku. From that time we started planning a demo. Years passed by and Markku found other members too around the band. First time we met alive was the first Astray rehearsals ever.

What kind of music do you enjoy listening privately? And do these listening influence you when composing your own materials?
Vesa: Anything with certain deepness. That's why I highly appreciate roughness and brutality in metal music. I like death metal bands such as Death, Morbid Angel, Carcass, trash stuff like Bathory, Celtic Frost, Destruction, Kreator, Metallica, Slayer, black metal like Emperor, Mayhem, Dark Throne, Beherit. I even like some harsh HC/crust stuff like Terveet Kädet, Discharge, Dead Kennedys or Driller Killer. On the other hand I like the sound of the seventies... Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Black Widow, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple… The best band in the world is Black Sabbath.
Markku: I listen to many kind of music, not just any specific genres, but it depends completely on the moods I’m having. About the metal, my long time favourite bands are for example Death, Dissection, Katatonia, Morbid Angel, Carcass, At The Gates, to name a few. Mostly early 90’s death/black bands. Sometimes I listen to bands such as Dream Theater and other “instrumentally high-quality” bands. On the non-metal side my absolute favourite is Secret Garden at the moment. Their music is just fucking great! Some other long time favourites are for example Mike Oldfield, Kitaro and Enigma. I listen to lots of instrumentalic “emotional” music, some Celtic music, some classical, and so on. I guess that every kind of music that you hear and like, makes some kind of subconscious influences for your own compositions, it’s difficult to avoid.

You're doing most of the music for Astray on your own. But you're also looking for additional members in the band. Would you like the new members to also contribute to the music? How do you compose the music, and how would you describe your style?
Markku: Yes, I have made all the music and Vesa has written all the lyrics for Astray and I think it works very well in that way. We have been suffering from the same problem since the beginning till now: Lack of musicians to complete our line-up. We are originally coming from very small cities from northern Finland, so it’s not really easy to find complete band line-up from there, where hardly lives a few thousands of people… Another problem in those small cities is the lack of studying possibilities and work, so, when you have finished secondary school, you usually have to move another cities to study or to get work. That happened also with the guys who were a part of Astray for some years. They moved to southern Finland to study and so there was no possibilities to participate on Astray anymore because of long distances. So, we are now back in our original line-up with only two members, but of course we would like to get a full line-up to be able to play gigs. I’m now living in Oulu (which is bigger city), so we are looking hopefully forward to find the missing parts from here. Well, I don’t have any problems to keep making all the future’s music of Astray by just myself, but of course I wouldn’t mind either if the new members would contribute to the compositions, as far as it would fit into Astray’s style. I compose music with the help of computer and I make always some kind of demo versions of the songs with it. I usually have some single melody or riff in my head and then I transfer it to guitar or keyboards and start making more riffs around it. When the song is ready, I make simple computer-drums for it and then record the rest of the instruments for the song. About my music style, well, I prefer to let everybody to describe it by themselves.

Apart of the guitars, bass and keyboards, you also play the drums. It's a bit different, as most of the 2-3 member bands miss the drummer. How did you start playing the drums, and how did you end playing so many instruments? What do you think about this recent more and more important trend of doing the drums on the PC?
Markku: I’ve always wanted to learn to play many different kind of instruments and music styles. In fact the drums were my first instrument to play metal. I started my “musical career” in the music academy back in ’85 by playing a trumpet, but after a couple of years my interest changed to play drums. I quit the music academy somewhere in ’87 and learnt to play drums in various garage bands. I played drums also in my first “more serious” band between ‘90-’95, which music style was brutal and melodic death metal. The band split-up in ’95 and at that time I bought an own guitar and started to make songs with it. I started playing keyboards just a few years ago, and about the bass guitar, I haven’t actually ever played it “seriously”, I just practised it a couple of weeks and then went to the studio and recorded bass lines for our album. But of course I want to learn more bass guitar playing as well because it’s so fucking great and challenging instrument! About doing the drums on the PC, if you mean the bands with drum-machines, well I can’t listen to seriously a “metal band” who has not real drummer but only some shitty drum-machine on their record… In my opinion metal band needs always a real drummer to create the aggressiveness that metal needs to be “metal”. For example, I have one old demo from some “brutal death metal” band which has no drummer. Well, the guitarists are playing like chain-saws, vocalist growls like beyond the grave and the machine drum is beating at least 666 BPM’s, but still, the result sounds more funny than brutal, just because there’s so fucking flat and poor sounding drum-machine on the background… Yes yes, I know that many people thinks the same when metal band is having used keyboards, so, opinions are opinions… Anyway, if you mean the bands that uses trigged drums on their records (and live shows as well), then it’s a different thing, as far as there’s still a real drummer playing and all the natural sound, rawness and atmosphere of the drums is not killed. I mean that in my opinion it’s ok to use triggers to make your album sounding better, but of course too much is too much… I don’t like about the trend that many famous bands seem to use nowadays on their records, I mean about trigging all the cans (and even cymbals) to make their drums sounding very clinical and mechanical, without any natural dynamics or sound.

What are you doing apart Astray, apart music? What motivates and inspires you?
Vesa: I'm more or less into photography. Lately more than ever. I like to take pictures of ugliness. But of course beauty of nature works always too. The fucked up side in it is that the Finnish nature is on its most impressive stage when it's -40 Celsius degrees and who the hell wants to go outside on weather like that?! Heh... maybe true Northern black metal warrior? Reading is for me some kind of way to escape but also to learn and to understand this world and human kind. I've also always been into writing so I've been also earning some money by doing that. To write a book has been in my mind for a long time but obviously I'm too lazy and inpatient for that.
Markku: I’m earning my bread and booze from IT industry and apart music, I don’t have any other specific or important hobbies. In general, not many things motivates me and my source of inspiration is mostly depression.

Where do you see Astray in a couple of years? What would be the main things you'd like achieving with Astray?
Markku: I wish that we could keep spreading Astray’s music by releasing more stuff and hopefully to get “a real band” line-up sooner or later to play live. My way of living is to write music and Vesa’s to write stories, so we will do it anyway, but of course it would be great if we could keep doing it in the form of Astray!
Vesa: As I earlier said the ultimate goal is the absolute truth. If we could get even one step closer, my satisfaction would be earned.

Well, that should be all for now! Anything to add in the end?
Markku: Thanks a lot for your interview and support!
Vesa: "...Can't resist the insects...Too many of them crawling on my skin..."