Once upon a time in a small town somewhere in Sweden, two young boys came up with the idea to start a band. This was in the fall of 1996. The boys' names were Daniel Terdell and Mikael Magnusson. They decided that they wanted to start a doom metal band. Although in the end their music didn't sound much like doom metal at all. Daniel was supposed to play bass, Mikael was going to play guitar and a boy named Gösta Sporrong was asked to handle the microphone. At first Torbjörn Ågren was going to play drums, but the rest of the band insisted on that it wasn't such a good idea. The year before they had all played together in a band called Bengt Sabbath, although they had to quit because Torbjörn, who played drums, always fooled around and couldn't stop playing. In the end the other members got so pissed at Torbjörn they all decided to quit the band. Therefore Carl Stjärnlöf was asked to play drums in the doom band, and he accepted. Torbjörn was instead going to play keyboard.

We started to rehearse sometime in the beginning of 1997. The first thing we did was to make a cover of Sepulturas' "Territory". Things went good and soon we had made our first song: "A Morning to Remember". We also made some more covers, like S.P.O.C.Ks' "Never Trust A Klingon", Slaskfittornas' "Birgit" and "Oh Susanna". We made a rehearsal recording of "A Morning to Remember" using a good-for-almost-nothing tape recorder. Although the sound quality was better than what you could expect from such a shitty tape recorder. We then managed to make another song: "A Lie To Trust Upon" which had some faster and more agressive parts than what can be found in "A Morning...". Although, even if things where going quite well, there was some minor conflicts in the band.

Our main problem at that time was that Gösta couldn't stand it when the other members of the band had somewhat childish outbursts during our rehearsals. The conflicts reached their climax in march '97. During one rehearsal, when Torbjörn just had made something out of the ordinary that broke our concentration, Gösta went berserk. He ran out of the room and never came back.

The rest of the band continued without Gösta. We spent the following weeks writing new material. We came up with some new parts but no complete songs. In the meantime we were searching for someone who could replace Gösta. We came up with a few suggestions but finally we focused our interest on Mikael Gustavsson, a.k.a. "G". We tried him out and finally decided to keep him as our vocalist.

One of our biggest problems was always to decide what we were going to name our band. There were many suggestions: Tjolahopp, Isildur, 666 Times the Pain, Kvinn'o'war etc. The person who solved our problem was Daniel. He had initiated an intense e-mail exchange with a brutal music journalist, Åsa Swanö, who at one point asked what the name of our band was. Daniel panicked and answered "ABSENTIA", something he had picked up from an album title. Åsa spontaneously replied "What a beautiful bandname!". We realised that if Åsa Swanö says that it's a good name, it must be. Therefore we named our band ABSENTIA.

Autumn came and we completed two new songs, Daemon Knight (Of Goodness) and an unamed goth-styled song. At this point we also re-arranged "A Lie To Trust Upon". Torbjörn had come up with a keyboard part consisting of extensive finger gymnastics. Out of this we created another epic piece of musical art which we named "I'm Just of Dust". Somewhere during this period we thought of the idea of getting ourselves a second guitarplayer. We eventually found a good one in Svante Enefalk who rehearsed with us a couple of times. But for some reason he disappeared out of the picture and remained gone for a long time...

In February 1998 we went into studio to record our first demo. During five days we recorded "A Morning...", "A Lie...", "I'm Just of Dust" and "Daemon Knight" (which we changed the title of to "Wishes"). Our former vocalist Gösta was invited to do some guest singing. Also, 3-WAY CUM and UNARMED vocalist Joppe barked a few parts on the demo. Oscar Carlsson from Arctic Ambience did some guitar solos on "A Morning..." and "Wishes". In fact we were so satisfied with his performance that we asked him to join ABSENTIA, an offer that he could not resist.

We released the demo and sold around a hundred copies. We got positive response to it and we were very proud of having put our first songs on tape. We were now reaching the spring of 1998. On the 20th of May we pulled of our very first live perfomance. About a hundred people came to see us at Björklokalen in Färjestaden. Things went well apart from that an on-stage monitor almost started to burn. Soon we got up on stage again. This time we played together with a vast number of bands at Folkets Hus in Kalmar. We were scheduled to play several hours past midnight and when we finally went up on stage we were probably as exhausted as the people in the crowd. Yet we managed to make it through the whole set with a rather good result anyway.

After this we took a short break during the summer. But after having spent a couple of months bathing and partying we headed back to our rehearsal room to continue to evolve. The next step of ABSENTIA's evolution process was that Oscar Carlsson felt that he had too little time to fulfill his task in the band. He decided to unplug his guitar, put on his shoes and head home. So with one guitarrist less we started riffing, humming, singing and composing some nice new tunes. Actually it didn't take very long before we stumbled across some very competent replacement for Oscar, namely Olof Holgersson. One day he entered our rehearsal room with a Fender in his hand and whilst being tried out we found that he knew all the riffs that we had forgotten over our summer holiday. Olof's permanent membership in the band was inevitable.

The first song to reach out of our amplifiers in the fall of '98 was "In Nighttime". Soon to follow was "Under Moonlit Skies". By the last months of the year we were about to get up on stage again. Not only once but two times. First we supported a stage play (!) in Mörbylånga on the 11th of November. Most of the people in the crowd were there only for the stage play and didn't understand peanuts of what we were doing when we entered the stage. Although when we were finished, a group of dark, suspicious people from the far sections of the hall immediately left before the stage play had even started. About a month later, on the 12th of December we supported a rather large swedish pop band called Broder Daniel along with a couple of other bands. That gig took place at Huset in Kalmar.

As 1998 turned into 1999 we added the final touches to a new song. We named it "Daemon Night II". We were starting to feel that the time had come for us to once again enter Bay Area studio in Kalmar to put another piece of ABSENTIA history on tape. We started to rehearse intensively during the first months of '99. We started to speculate about whether we should incorporate some different types of vocals on this recording. Spoken parts and male vocals were up for discussion. But we eventually took most interest in the concept of female vocals. We were dicussing a number of females who we considered to be suitable for the task. The female who we decided to assign was Anna Wallin. She had been carefully studied by Carl who instantly took fancy in her skills.

In only a few weeks we were going to enter the studio again. We didn't have time to re-arrange all songs to fit in Anna's vocals so we decided to give her some limited space on the finished songs. Instead we decided to compose a new song to which we would give Anna free space to let her vocal cords oscillate. Soon we had completed a cozy ballad which we at first named "The snake and the apple". We realised that the name was far too cheesy and tried to come up with a better name. Our heavy efforts in the matter gave no satisfying results and we came to a point were we felt urged to desperately open an english dictionary and randomly pick a word. The word that came up was "unquestionable". Well, there was no question about it: the name of the ballad was going to be "Unquestionable".

Before we went into studio we once more performed live at Huset on the 20th of March. This day happened to be Torbjörns birthday. Unfortunately this joyful occation caused Torbjörn to be unable to stay away from the bottle and this left him on stage in an ominous condition. To make our chances of making a good performance even worse, the on stage sound was terrible.

It was a lovely Saturday morning in April when we joyfully skipped up the stairs to Bay Area studio in Kalmar. We felt well prepared and had high hopes of making a far better recording than the previous one. Actually it didn't start off very well, when the double pedal played a trick on us that delayed us a couple of hours. But having past that obstacle, things went smooth all the way. We all felt very satisfied with our performances. Engineer Johan Kalin made a very good job too, providing us with a fat, juicy sound. Anna proved to have a vocal capacity beyond all expectations and we were very pleased with her efforts. At one point in the studio Mikael expressed how pleased he was by stating that: "Liv Kristine couldn't have done that any better". Apart from Anna we once more invited Joppe to howl some more and Oscar to play another couple of guitar solos. At first we were scheduled for twenty hours in the studio, but those hours ran away pretty fast when all six people in the band plus the guests were putting their parts on tape. In the end we had spent totally forty hours in the studio. But it was all worth it, because it resulted in a demo recording that we were very satisfied with.

After the recording we took a well deserved break. Unfortunately our efforts to release the new demo were at the same time put off. When we were getting ready to start rehearsing again in August, tradgedy struck. One day, when we entered our rehearsal room we found that most of our equipment had been stolen. Guitars, effect processors, keyboard and more were all gone. We were devastated and realised that this would make it very difficult for us to continue. We had no instruments, no insurances that would cover the loss and no money to buy new equipment. From here our activity was set back for over half a year. Finally we were able to buy some new instruments and start rehearsing in January 2000. By then we had decided that we were going to let another member into our big family. Anna Wallin had made such a great job on the demo that we offered her permanent membership in the band. At the same time our bass player Daniel had left town to study which made his situation in the band very difficult. We had no other option than to search for a new bass player. This was the time for a reunion with an old acquaintance. The long forgotten Svante Enefalk who once played guitar with us for a while came back. And this time he brought a bass guitar with him. We started to rehearse and found that we hadn't forgotten our songs and the magic was still there. Svante impressed with his bass playing skills and this time he was here to stay. We immediately started working on two new songs and made use of Torbjörns shining new keyboard, Roland XP-80.

And finally, after much delay and sloth, after having turned down a number of covers and after many hours in front of the computer writing CDs, the demo was ready to be released. We decided to give it the name "Astral Surgery" and we recieved much postive response to it.

Winter gave spring a miss and went straight to summer when we once again took Kalmar by storm by playing live at Huset. This time we rocked the crowd's socks off together with the bands Portal and Hypnosia. Svante and Anna lost their playing-live-with-Absentia- virginity at this joyful occation.

Soon afterwards several of the band members started to pack their bags to move to other cities around Sweden. Once again things seemed to become difficult for us. But nothing could stop us and we continued writing material and preparing to go into studio again.

Time went on and the activity was low. Although plans were set up for a new recording in the beginning of 2001. We didn't get the opportunity to get together to rehearse until the christmas holidays. By then there had been another burglary at Musikhuset which made it impossible for us to rehearse there. We tried to solve the situation and ended up in Carl's tiny room where we squezed in all our equipment and started to rehearse the new song "Thorns of Fear" together with two older songs: "G.B.P." and "Lack of Capacity". Though the situation was rather funny: seven people, a bunch of amplifiers and a drumset in a Carl's tiny room, we managed to get rather good sound and much practice.

This leaves us just about where we are today. We've just got out of the studio and the new demo "Saturnic Rights" is recorded.



Source : home7.swipnet.se/~w-79958/absentia/frameset_hi.html