Ajattara

Ajattara est. 1996

Back in 1996, I was a lonely boy who was a singer in pretty famous band called Amorphis. I did listen bands like Venom, ‘Slayer, Possessed, Bathory and Black Sabbath, Motorhead , ACDC ,Nirvana and Hardcore in general, meaning bands like the Exploited, Carnivore, Suicidal Tendencies, D.R.I, Discharge etc. I’m a great fan of Grindcore too, meaning, Carcass, Napalm death, Filty cristians, Unohdettu Tulevaisuus(crust punk) and so on..also theres many other bands and music styles and genres infected me during the years, like industrial scene with Ministry, NIN, Throbbing gristle,Craftwerk, Killing joke, to just name a few.

Okay, I got this passion for extreme culture and so the story of AJATTARA begins. I was touring a lot with Amorphis and new wave of Black metal was at it’s hingest position of all times and we got a lot of new black metal bands as a support, and trough the players in these bands I got to know a lot of Norwegian bands like Darkthrone, Burzum, Mayhem, Troll ,Dimmu borgir , Ulver and many others. Then there was a great bands from Sverige for example Marduk and Dissection, who I was inspired to listen and when I had a moment to think what I really wanted to do, I came out with an idea of a Black metal band. For the cause it’s the music I most love and I adore it’s deep atmosphere, filosofical aspect in a lyrics and most of all the POWER, the FORCE of the darkside.

I had a little set up to compose music in my flat back then, including Fostecs 4-tracker, korg X3 workstation and a guitar. With this set up I made a few demos and played them to my friends and got a good respond like” keep doing that shit, it fuking awesome!”

In 1998 I met Pekka Sauvolainen and he became the Malakias. Now Ajattara was two guys with hell of an attitude and we both where heavy stoners. I been smoking like 3 decades but never ever it has been as lot as we smoked Hasish during recording the first released demo of Ajattara “Helvetissä on Syntisen Taivas” 1998. We didn’t send it to anywhere and we just kept hanging on a sofa with a bong and listen it over and over again, repeatedly. Of course there were some friends who want it to burn a cd out of 6 new spychedelic Black metal hits and of course it was okay, so this is a way it started to spread around and a one beautyfull summer morning I got a phone call from a record company called Spikefarm, that was a part of bigger label called Spinefarm. They have heard the demo”Helvetissä on syntisen taivas”1998 somewhere, somehow and it’s still a mystery how our demo ended up in their hands but a most important thing in all of this was that they wanted to make a record of it. So we got a deal and 2001 the first album “ITSE” was released.

I was not too exited to do any shows with my new project but as soon as the first album”ITSE” was released everybody who was into us wanted to see us live and this was a true beginning that still is a main thing for Ajattara, live shows!
Okay here is a little desert for a history and blog of Ajattara written by me Itse Ruoja Suruntuoja.. hope you enjoyed this one and theres more to come as story continues at every thursday for now one!