Aarni hails from the legend-haunted city of Oulu in Northern Finland. The band"s music has been described as "almost orthodox doom metallish Lovecraftian-Jungian Kalevala avantgarde music", although this definition only manages to scratch the surface of the matter. The band themselves prefer the term "Chthonic Music".

Aarni"s story began in the autumn of "98, when Markus Marjomaa quit a local gothic metal band called Inevitable due to music-related conflicts within the band. Master M., who had founded Inevitable and was its lead guitarist and co-composer, began solitarily developing his musical ideas further. Soon Comte de Saint-Germain appeared and immediately joined Aarni. When the two gentlemen conducted an unsuccessful necromantic ritual at Moominpappa"s cenotaph, a third member was added to the band in the form of Doomintroll. Simultaneously the first letter of M.M."s surname flipped over and his mutation into Master Warjomaa was complete.

The fourth band member isn"t really a member as such, but does nonetheless partake in Aarni"s creative process. For Mistress Palm is in fact composed entirely of artificial, flogiston-driven rectoplasm and due to her incorporeal nature can only exist on a computer"s hard disk.

The themes underlying Aarni"s music are A) Finnish folklore and paganism B) the occult, parapsychology, the mythologies of different world cultures and theories of analytical psychology (especially those of C.G. Jung) C) Cthulhu mythos as described by H.P. Lovecraft and other authors (sometimes handled with a slight tongue-in-cheek approach) and D) Topics not included in the above categories.

Aarni"s lyrics are written in the language most suitable for the song"s subject: usually in Finnish, Classical Latin or English and occasionally in French, Ancient Egyptian, Swedish etc.

Aarni strives to avoid using too much traditional song-structures, similar-sounding parts and other such conventions and restrictions in its music. In fact the band"s music functions as therapy to its members and represents a stream of their unrepressed conscious and unconscious material. Therefore most of Aarni"s songs may seem hard to grasp to the average listener, who has grown accustomed to the conventional song-structures and general musical uninnovativeness rife in contemporary music.