Awhile ago I was asked by Finland’s KAAOS ZINE to name 5 albums that influenced me as a musician here is the article that was published April 4, 2018. To the original article

”When I was asked to write this piece about the top 5 albums that influenced me as a musician, I thought this will be an impossible task. There are thousands of albums from different genres of music which have had an impact on me personally. I have chosen here 5 landmarks ín an anthology, as landmarks through the twisted forest of my musical development.”

1. KISS – ”Dynasty”:

”I was around nine years old walking through a Sears Roebucks store in Grand Junction Colorado when the demons spoke to me for the first time. I saw these 4 evil clowns staring at me from the cover of Kiss’s hardrock disco album. They somehow called to my already awakening antisocial inner core. My parents were hippies and very involved themselves in music. I grew up listening to Simon and Garfunkle and all the other hippie cult folk music of their time. So it wasn’t hard to convince them to let me take these monsters home with me. ”Dynasty” was my very first cassette tape that I ever owned. I listened to it non stop memorizing the lyrics and rhythms. I don’t listen to this album anymore but still can remember the songs from top to bottom.”

2. Mötley Crue – ”Shout At The Devil”

”From ages 9–13 I went through many different metamorphosis listening to all types of music even the tripe sold to the mindless herd over the radio. But living then in Northern California heavy metal was becoming a big thing along with MTV, which appealed to those inner demons I carried in my backpack, my monsters. I would go to the record store and sort through the albums spending my weekly allowance on new sounds that might disturb the hippies. I had AC/DC, Scorpions, Def leppard and ”SHOUT AT THE DEVIL”. It wasn’t really the music itself that Motley Crue made but it was again the monsters calling to me. A bad ass image, a fuck you lifestyle, I would suffer through hours of Cindy Lauper videos just for the chance to be hypnotised by a Crue video. My friends and I would trek to the local supermarket and buy metal magazines which we would study from cover to cover. It was in one of these articles I read of Nikki Sixx, a tour bus and a Jack Daniel’s bottle when I decided I needed to play bass, heavy metal musicians got the chicks, and as a hyper hormonal teenager, I wanted chicks too!”

3. Possessed – ”7 Churches”

”Now had my first weapon, a 1983 Ibanez X-series Destroyer 4 string model. I practiced the same blues scale daily to my neighbors dismay. The Bay Area thrash metal scene was spawning then, in Northern California you either listened to thrash or damned as a poser and traitor to mankind.The first genres in metal were taking form. The aggression and the dirty unmelodic sounds ( the monsters) possessed me all the way to the bone. Finally something, the hippies who tried to tell me how to live, wouldn’t understand. I rattled my god damn head to Exodus, Slayer, Venom, Metallica, Destruction the list is endless. I even got to witness many of these bands live in small clubs in San Francisco. I had a hunger for the extreme, it quenched the chill in my soul. Possessed – 7 Churches, pushed those limits I was seeking and helped push me over the edge into death metal with its combination of the non-melodic and the obscene.”

4. Revenant – ”Prophecies Of A Dying World”

”In my late teens, I was moved away from the garage band in Eureka California to the suburbs of New York City in New Jersey. I quickly set my fangs into some local guys and started a thrash band called Parasyte. The New York scene was a gathering place for pushing boundaries, with NYHC, thrash and an emerging beast called death metal. Not long after I met John McEntee and Henry Veggian from the band Revenant. They were looking for a bassist. At the time I was reading Crowley and immersing myself in the occult constantly searching for something more something darker. I went to a Revenant rehearsal and was consumed by its technicality and its heavy obscurity. When they asked me to join the band I couldn’t resist. Revenantwas responsible for me going over the edge in my music addiction and a turning point where music became more than a hobby. I had played on many demos before with punk and thrash bands, but Revenant was a new dimension. We were soon after signed to a little underground record label from Germany called Nuclear Blast. We traded gigs with other obscure underground bands like Cannibal Corpse and Immolation to later tour with rising bands like Morbid Angel and Napalm Death. Death metal was being conceived and the New York scene was a main headquarters for the brutality.”

5. Machine Head – ”Burn My Eyes”

”After the demise of Revenant I found my way to South Florida. The New York scene was slowly giving up the ghost, but many of its soldiers were moving near Morris Sound Studios and the Florida metal scene. I was asked to play in a side project with Rob Barret (Cannibal Corpse) and Phil Fasciana (Malevolent Creation) called HatePlow . I recorded an the debut album with HP entitled ”Everybody Dies” (Arctic / Pavement Records) before leaving the band. During that time I was listening to Alice and Chains , one of my all time favorite bands, and exposed to lots of other music of that epoch such as Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids who practiced next door to us. Machine Head was a band that reminded me of ghosts in California. Maybe I was getting tired already then of blast beats or maybe it was just nostalgia or maybe I had pissed enough people off that my monsters were appeased. But groove metal, a close kin to thrash fed my need for metal and Old had all the elements. After a long time away from music I moved to Sweden. Here I have played in a few death metal bands, Volturyon (Vicisolem) and Margrave(Bifrost Records), but the echoes of groove and thrash were still in my backbone. Methane was created in 2013 to feed the beast always beckoning me to play.”