How are you doing at the moment?
I am doing pretty well. I am keeping myself busy with these interviews. It is good to finally do some press for the album. It is one and a half month before the release, it is about time to spread the word a little bit and tomorrow I will have a pre-listening session in Helsinki with Finnish reporters. It is exciting to do that, because going there in front of Finnish reporters, it is like going to the wolf’s nest, but maybe I can do it (chuckles).

How did this new band Octoploid in 2022 come into being?
I had lots of songs in my drawer and I thought: ‘what am I going to do with it?’ and I have to admit that I have been thinking about putting out a solo album for many years already. I thought this might be the moment, because if I am not doing it now, it’s never going to happen and fortunately I was able to find really talented musicians like Mikko Pietinen on drums and Peter Salonen on guitars. He is a really talented young guitar player from Lahti in Finland and also Kim Rantala and Kasper Mårtenson on keyboards, both are Amorphis members. What connect those human beings, they are not exactly metal musicians. They are like rock musicians and play folk as well and progressive rock primary and it was the idea in the first place to try to find non metal musicians for this project and that is how it started to build up. Mikko, the drummer, he is having a studio nearby here. We just started to play there together and put down the basic tracks of the demos which actually ended up being on the album as well. That is the long story put short. About the vocalists: I probably was willing to have a permanent vocalist on the album, but then, since I could not find anyone, I thought okay, I will use different vocalists who are on my list. I actually got all of them except one who did not have time to record. Instead I asked Petri Eskelinen who is a friend of mine and he has been singing in a band called Rapture back in the days. Nowadays he is the singer in Feastem which is a kind of grindcore/hardcore band. That is how it all came together, little by little. It was a huge project, but bit by bit we made it.

Congratulations, because you already have a busy life with Amorphis, Barren Earth and Mannhai… these are all bands with a slightly different style…
Mannhai is stoner rock, but Barren Earth is a little bit the same as Octoploid and Amorphis. The business was very busy with Amorphis, because we were touring very much and in between those tours, we recorded the Octoploid album. Yeah it was hectic, but a fruitful session. I love it.

Mikko Kotamäki is announced as the main singer on the info sheet…
Well yeah, in the case we are going to do live shows, Mikko will be probably there, because he has time, he is keen to do it and he is a great vocalist. He is able to do all those songs. It is better to have one vocalist live than five or ten (chuckles). But it is not certain yet that we will be touring. If we will tour, where we will tour and with who, but we have spoken about it and I think we can do some gigs at least. So hopefully the record goes well and we will find a good agent in Europe and in Finland as well. It might be next year, but probably we can make it.

Why did you choose for the name Octoploid?
Well, it is a long story. It is like a creature with eight chromosomes and there are eight songs on the album, also during the sessions and also there are eight members in the band at the time when this issue came up. So it refers to that number and of course it is a good name. It could be a stoner rock band or it could be a progressive rock band, maybe even a death metal band. Basically I did not want a typical death metal name or a genre and of course it does not harm that the name has my initials OPL in the middle of it. It gives a signal that it is my solo band (laugh).

Was there a certain reason why you called the album ‘Beyond The Aeons’, because it sounds a bit spacey or soaring…
Yes it is spacey and the theme is spacey. It actually comes from a song called ‘Shattered Wings’ which has a name taken from Finnish folklore in it, it is basically a person who is thinking more than speaking. It means that your thoughts are somewhere else than here in the present time and I have been accused myself of being a distant person’ sometimes. It is a good name, it sounds good and it looks good, so I wanted to use it as album title.

What are you inspired by when writing lyrics? Something special?
Of course we have a long history with Kalevala, so it is easy to come up with those kind of lyrics, but personally I am reading a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, William Blake and Nietzsche. It is a mixture of all those, the influences. I try to read some poetry and then I take one of two good phrases and start from there to bring in some personal issues that make sense. When it is more personal, it is easier to sing. For me the most important thing is how the lyrics sound like, even more important than the content of the lyrics, because it has to serve the music somehow. If you can have both of them, make them sound good and have a great content, maybe that is a good combination.

In the info sheet they call your music ‘classic death prog’ or ‘seventies death metal’, that is funny…
Yes, it was ‘seventies death metal’, but the new term is classic death prog, but it is difficult to say, because I would not call this death metal, I would not call this melodic death metal. It is some sort of metal, of course, but still there are lots of influences from prog rock bands and really psychedelic alternative bands from the nineties. Still there is a death metal basis and there are growling vocals, so I don’t know what to call it. Maybe you can tell me what it is? (laughs)

A good mixture of everything… 
Yeah I think it is a little bit weird that bands have to be under some label always. You have to name what kind of music is playing. Very often it is not possible. For me it is just music and that’s it.

It already sounds very impressive with clean guitar sounds in the beginning of ‘Dawns In Nothingness’….
Yes, it is an acoustic guitar. I played it double with one plugged in guitar. It is based on Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti westerns songs. It had to be some kind of Italian mafia restaurant melody, but that is how it was done. It was half computer and half of it was played by myself on acoustic guitar.

You appear to be a multi-instrumentalist, we did not know that until now…
Well, it took some time before I could play guitar, but at least I can do something.

And the keyboards you do partly as well, although there are two other guys helping you with keyboards…
Yeah because there was not time enough to record the keyboards with the keyboard players, so I used some of the keyboards that I played myself at the demos. Of course I enhanced them a little bit, but I had to leave them on the album because the other guys could not pull them off. I play a little bit keyboards. Actually I started to play keyboards when I was a kid, six years or something, but it never got anywhere and then I started to play bass and that kind of stuck. I can do some parts on keyboards, but I will never be brilliant on it, but I can do something.