Opium Warlords | en

Opium Warlords is a vessel of sonic occultism, a process of musical therapy and an apparatus of a long distance communication with people and other species.

Its embryonic existence started around 2004, when the name of the band was found in the autobiography of Dee Dee Ramone. There were some plans to start something. It never came to be.

The next level was reached in 2006, and this time the musical elements were meant to be "oriental". This phase never got beyond being a mere idea, either.

Practically, Opium Warlords were born on the 18th of March, the 33rd birthday (remember the mystic from Nazarene and his ill fate) of its Messianic father Sami Albert Hynninen - already notorious from and hated for SOPO, KLV, The Candles Burning Blue, Reverend Bizarre, Mesmer/Orne, Armanenschaft, March 15, Werwolf Lodge, Vironsusi, Forests of Old, The Puritan, Azrael Rising, and Spiritus Mortis - when the studio sessions for their first album started.

This was done in secrecy, so that had everything failed in some horrible way, an escape route would have been close at hand. It is said that money had actually been put aside for a one-way flight ticket to Indonesia.

Surprisingly, this project never leaked to the public. In these days of fast information and a new culture of online rumours this is something that should be celebrated, isn't it? Or maybe no one cared...

Well, obviously the plan B did not have to be used after all. Still, these recordings became the greatest challenge S.A.H. had ever faced so far, as he was playing rhythm guitars for the first time in his life. The guitar used, Les Paul Studio, was borrowed from a friend a month before the recordings started, and as there was not much time to try to figure out how one actually plays such an instrument it lead to constant practicing and inflammation of wrists. He was not much of a drummer either, and this was also the first time he would be controlling the whole process totally alone, only with the help from the engineers. The result was a mental state close to a so-called nervous breakdown.

Everything else was kind of easy. If we forget about the court case S.A.H. had to go through during this same period of time. He, and a friend of his, were convicted for an assault against three steroid-driven muscle masters working as "security" in one nightclub. We can all imagine how these things go and what actually was the truth, but the judge was too high on sniffing her owns panties to understand that, even when the "victims" were totally out of focus in the trial, barely able to speak and certainly unable to read or write.

Anyway. The sessions were long and hard, but very successful and inspired. All the material was composed and arranged very strictly before entering the studio, but still many improvisations out of the blue took place.

Originally, "lead guitars" in the ordinary sense were neither planned nor wanted, but from some horrible AOR depths they entered the picture. And there they are now, among all the doomy and monotone riffs and tender soft rock moments.

Well, of course mind fucking leads are essential for soft rock, if you want to go there...

What was, somewhere deep in the chambers of a sick mind, meant to be a testament, a final cry for the surrounding world, a suicidal note even, now seems to be only the first step towards enlightenment.

Opium Warlords are here, and they won't go away. Surely they will disappear from the "scene" if there's no one to buy the album, but even then the project probably will go on in the hermetic atmosphere of Agartha 8 shrine of the third watchtower in the sleepy suburbia of Voudinpuisto, where only birds and insects will witness the musical evolution on that state of being...

Be that as it may, OPIUM WARLORDS LIVE AT COLONIA DIGNIDAD is here NOW, released by a new fashionable record label called Cobra.

Even now there are rumours circulating of new sessions starting in the coming winter! Epic Heavy Doom Metal with plenty of keyboards??? Casio-driven ambient Black Metal??? Stoner Rock with lots of balls??? Who will be about to tell?

Tune yourself back to these frequencies and you will be kept updated with all the news.

And hey: Don't dream it! Be it!

www.myspace.com/opiumwarlords .