WASTE OF SPACE ORCHESTRA

Oranssi Pazuzu and Dark Buddga Rising unite to redefine heaviness

live can be daunting for any band. In the case of Waste Of Space Orchestra, though, no one had heard a note of their music until they premiered it on stage. Comprised of members from the mind-bending Finnish psych doom and black metal bands Dark Buddha Rising and Oranssi Pazuzu, Waste Of Space Orchestra was created when Roadburn festival commissioned the two bands to create a set of music together especially for the festival last year. It pulled in one of the biggest crowds of the whole weekend.

“I’d been going to Roadburn for years before I ever dreamed I’d play there,” says Oranssi Pazuzu frontman Juho ‘Jun-His’ Vanhanen. “I trusted that the audience would have the concentration to dig into something new. “I had nervousness, more because we’d been working for six months for that one day… if something goes wrong it’d be a major disappointment.

But it went smoothly, and we realised that we couldn’t leave it there.”

This meant heading into the studio to put this self-described “progressive space opera” to tape: the result is swarming with twisting yet tightly composed sinister and monumentally heavy psychedelia, written around a suitably out-there concept following three characters, which Jun-His describes as “a journey to your mind’s dark side”.

“There is so much music nowadays where you don’t have to concentrate so much, and I think it’s good to have something to linger in your mind,” says Jun-His. “When you listen to it again, you find new layers and interpretations. It’s pretty visual: in Oranssi Pazuzu we have a criteria where you have to be able to have visual ideas in your head to continue working with a song. If not, we throw that part away.” As for the future, nothing is set in stone beyond an album release show in Helsinki this June. But for this collective that are redefining heavy music, we hope their journey won’t end there.