JOURNEY INTO THE BEYOND
“I like to think of our music as a painting. But a painting where there’s a hand coming from it and starting to choke you.”
Toni ‘Ontto’ Hietamäki, bassist and lyricist for Oranssi Pazuzu (the band name referring to the demon from The Exorcist, but orange), is offering his own interpretation of the mental, often nightmarish lurch that’s likely to occur every time you cross his band’s musical threshold. Formed in the creatively fertile city of Tampere, Finland – home to a closely knit cabal of Hexvessel, Grave Pleasures, Dark Buddha Rising and Vesperith, to name a few – Oranssi Pazuzu have set about mining black metal for its most psychedelic properties, over the course of the past 13 years, honing their art until they’ve become one of the trippiest and most transformative experiences the underground has yet produced.
Initially operating under the radar, undistracted by the weight of expectation the music scene tends to place on bands from the off, Oranssi Pazuzu’s reputation for mind-warping adventurism has grown steadily to the point where it’s now, word-of-mouth process reserved for bands so keyed in to a resonant, altered state that you feel like you’ve arrived on an alien planet, sending out a signal for other, likeminded inhabitants.
