Dark Sun Biography
The Finnish psychedelic space rock band Dark Sun was formed in 1991. In the beginning they called themselves The Echoes, then The Mythagos Wood. There were even a few other options, before the rather mysterious and polarized Dark Sun was chosen in '92.
At first they draw their influences from a whole range of different musical styles like metal, 60' and 70's rock, alternative, psychedelia, gothic, punk etc. Soon they realised that their mission was to fill Finland, Europe and the whole universe with psychedelic space rock.
The first time the band ever went to a studio was in January '93. The result was the famous demo tape with tracks "Astral Magic/Visions of Infinity", "Standing at The Edge of Chaos" and "Ways of The Damned". The tape gained them underground status and some airplay. The second tape including "Machine Lover", "Lost In Time" and "One For The Blind" was recorded in December. It also got some airplay, and the band was invited to do a radio interview in Radio City.
In January 1994, the world saw the first Dark Sun live appearance. This happened at the sold-out Shadow Club in Helsinki. The audience was at once hooked to their hypnotic, emotional and powerful music! The band kept on writing new material and playing gigs in Finland. Around this time they got to know Five Fifteen, with whom they have been gigging quite a lot. This friendship even inspired Mika J�rvinen, the mad singer and guitarist, to write a song called "The Starship Dark Sun", which is on 5.15's excellent "Psychedelic Singalongs for Stadiums" CD. Dark Sun repaid this honour later on with a track called "Wooden Man", that can be found on their Demo I '98.
In 1994 the band was contacted by Gaga Goodies boss Miettinen, who wanted to release a Dark Sun 7". Dark Sun recorded and mixed two tracks "Shutter Me" and "My Statued Fire" on their own expense, made a beautiful picture cover, and send the stuff to Mr. Miettinen. Nothing was ever heard from him again, and he didn't even return the stuff, so fuck him.
The next year saw two new tape releases from the band, the first a live one, and the second a studio demo of Hawkwind classics "Assault & Battery", "The Golden Void" and "The Right Stuff". This demo, as their first two from '93, was recorded and mixed by the now famous Hiili Hiilesmaa. Some people have said, that the versions of "Assault/Void" are even better that the originals! At this point Metamorphos, a small Finnish record company, wanted to do a 7" with the band, and it was recorded in early '96. The 500 copies of the "Feed Your Mind/Song The Seamans Bane" single sold-out fast enough, and Dark Sun started to record their first CD. "Feed Your Mind" album (1500 copies) was released in Summer '97, and was very well received by fans and critics. It's now pretty hard to get, but a few places still stock it. "Feed Your Mind" is still played regularly at some internet music radios.
At one point the Dark Sun live band had grown to nine members, featuring two guitarists, bassist, drummer, two percussionists, two synth players and a singer. This prevented them to play at some smaller venues, but made their massive wall of sound even bigger.
Dark Sun was invited to play at the annual Hawkfan meeting in Hamburg, Germany, called The 1997 Space Party. This was a dream come true in many ways: first gig outside of Finland, and a change to play with the Hawkwind co-founder, singer, flutist, saxophonist, freak, Nik Turner! Other acts during the weekend of 13. - 14.6.included The Tribe of Cro, Alan Davey's Beduin, Trev Thoms etc. Nik played with the band the last half of their set, which was about 40 minutes.
The band was incorporating even more sequencer stuff into their music. Also, they started to use drum machines along with live drums. With only one keyboard player left in the band, this was necessary to maintain the rich sound they had accomplished during the years. They also wanted to improve and take space rock into new levels.
Metazoon was the name of the Metamorphos compilation CD released in 1997. It contained unreleased material by Metamorphos bands like Circle and Moonfog Prophet. There were one long majestic instrumental by Dark Sun called Time-Space Continuum. This was the first sign of their new style. There was supposed to be also another DS track called "Zombie Tree" on Metazoon, but they didn't have enough resources to mix it.
A new demo was recorded in January 1998 including two versions of "Iskariot" and "Wooden Man". Both these tracks were planned to be on the second studio album Dark Sun was supposed to record the same year. Metamorphos postponed the recordings due to money problems, time after time until it's demise in 2000. That's too bad, because especially "Iskariot" was an immortal piece of space rock history.
They played at the Space & Rock Festival in J�nk�ping, Sweden with Man, Darxtar, The Spacious Mind, Pseudo Sun etc. This was "the best space rock festival that no-one came to", as someone put it� It seems like the organiser was too busy building a spacecraft to escape the coming destruction of the Earth, that he forgot to advertise his festival� Nik Turner joined them on stage again. In December, the band recorded another demo including "Electrified" and " Dream Circuit". They weren't happy at all with the result, so they re-recorded a lot of tracks and remixed the whole thing on their own during 1999. This was then released as "Electric Dreams" promo CD-R, limited to 100 copies. This EP had Nik on sax and flute. Later copies also included the track "The Epic World of Captain Gizmo". Now Dark Sun had gone into totally new area of space adding a whole lot of electronics, machine rhythms, loops and samples made available by the enormous use of computer techniques and manipulation. Even though "Electrified" had a lot of even commercial potential, their attempts to get a good record deal failed.
In 1999, Nik Turner visited Finland to play with Dark Sun and Five Fifteen. He also played with Jukka Tolonen, Silver Surfer and a local jazz band. He did some studio work with Dark Sun, Five Fifteen and a death rock band Babylon Whores. His performance with Dark Sun at Tavastia club, Helsinki, was recorded. Most of this was released in 2000 as a limited edition of 300 copies vinyl album. The album was the first release of Danish Burnt Hippie Recordings. "Ice Ritual", as Nik named it, also contained a few tracks from a Hawkwind cover gig in '98 with Mika J�rvinen on guitar and backing vocals. It's all classic Hawkwind stuff like "Master of The Universe", "Hassan I Sahba", "Brainstorm" , "Silver Machine" and so on.
Dark Sun was having a break in 2001, and didn't do any gigs. The biggest reason for this must have been the frustration of not being able to do another studio album. "Ice Ritual" was released as a CD, limited to 500 copies. The CD version is re-mastered and includes bonus track "Dream Circuit" from "Electric Dreams" promo. Some of the band members have been busy with other band projects, and a couple of the guys have a psychedelic music club "Psychotropic Zone". We can only hope, that the boys will be able to make the second CD happen and do a lot of gigs in 2002!
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