Full bio
Early days (2000-2004)
The formation of the band sources from Juha Untinen and Tero Konola experimenting with all kinds of recording techniques and writing some original songs, under the original band name Aftershock in early 2000. The name was soon changed to Sound Ogre after it was found out there were plenty of bands with the name Aftershock. Many of the original songs were posted to mp3.com which was fairly popular back in the years 2000-2001, even locally. As a fair amount of encouraging comments were received, the idea of writing more songs of our own got sparked and we quickly had two demos ready, called Beta and Pulsebeat. This was still under the Sound Ogre moniker. A third demo, Death.com, was completeled but never published. However, two of the songs from that demo were played in our first live performance - Endless Stairs and Loppusyksy. The former would later appear on the first Sound Ogre EP called Extinct (2004), which also featured the third song from the show (The Sentence Is Death).
A new EP was starting to form in 2002, with 4 new songs taking shape but never published. One of those was getting fairly close to the style of the two published Sound Ogre EPs - the previously mentioned Extinct, as well as the follow-up EP Asphyxiation (2005). These two EPs would already be reminiscent of what would eventually be the Vortech sound. Still instrumental, the second EP was going to have vocals, but eventually no vocalist was found to finish them. It was also far more experimental in style and structure, something that would later be present on the album Deep Beneath (2008). During this time, the idea of creating a full length album started to brew.
The beginning of Vortech (2005-2008)
Since Tero had become busy with other projects - for example Relativity, that Juha would later join - it was now Juha working on the music himself. So as the style would also change a little bit, it was of course logical to come up with a new name for the project. And after a while, the source became, as often is the case, a lyric or a name from one of the band's favourite bands. In this case, the song duo Vortech I and Vortech II by the British industrial metal band Cubanate. It wasn't known what Vortech meant, but it sure sounded cool! And later on, it became even cooler to discover it is a fairly famous supercharger manufacturer for fast cars! Very suitable for the music style! Following the name change in late 2005, the first demos were recorded, but never released.
In early 2006, the songwriting for what would become the first full length album, Conclusion (2006), started and the album was ready in fairly short order. The first four songs ended up on the album almost as-is, followed by the rest of the songs written just as quickly. With the success of getting the album ready so quickly, it was time to immediately start writing the next album. The next six months from May 2006 onwards were spent demoing songs for what would eventually become the popular album Wasteland (2007).
Note that you can find more details about specific albums' recording session in their studio reports, which you can view through the Music section on this site.
And with Wasteland being ready in early 2007, it was time to compose more songs for what would finally end up becoming Deep Beneath (2008). The entire album was written while waiting for the guest vocalists to record their parts for Wasteland, so Deep Beneath was released less than 6 months after the release of Wasteland!
The busy era (2008-2014)
Things started moving fast following the release of Deep Beneath, with Mikko Särkimäki joining the band during the recording sessions. In the spring of 2008, we started to rehearse extensively for future live shows. This was also a time when the writing process for our most popular album, Posthumanism (2009), started. The entire album was ready by the end of the year, and we even rehearsed some of the new songs. So much so, that in the first show we did in June 2009, we played 4 of the 11 songs on the album!
Around August 2009, it was also time to start writing more songs. These would be ready by spring 2010, but would take another 2 years to be released in the form of Devoid of Life, with Mikko Nikula on voicals and Ville Miinala playing live drums on the album. We also continued rehearsing heavily and also writing the next album, The Occlusion (2014) little by little.
With The Occlusion having a very different style, Ville eventually continued with other projects and we continued recording with Mikko Nikula. During this time, the songwriting for what would become ...of What Remains (2015) had also started and continued until summer 2014. Once the songwriting for the album was ready, there was a bit of a break, while waiting for the vocals to be recorded, that was spent experimenting with some new recording techniques.
The current era (2015 onwards)
The songwriting for The Shadow Presence (2022) started already in February 2015, and continued until around summer 2017. While the entirety of the album's instruments were recorded back in early Autumn 2018, the release took quite a bit longer and ended up with a new guest vocalist joining in. The style was again similar to the classic Posthumanism-Of What Remains era, with some new things included.
The process had been fairly fine-tuned by now, so the sessions for the - as of now, unreleased - 9th full length album technically began in early 2022, but as it has songs from through the years, the oldest song dates back to 2016!. The majority of the songs are from the February Album Writing Month sessions between 2016-2022. The album recording is just about ready, with some vocals left to do before release, sometime in the end of 2025!