Here’s a bit of history about Forge. Me, Tuomo (my brother who plays the bass), Jussi (the drummer) and a couple of other guys (Teemu Hytti - vocals and Ari Leinonen - guitar) thought that it would be damn cool to start a band. I recall it was the autumn of 1994 in Lappeenranta, Eastern Finland. We started making our own music right away and during the years 1995-1996 we had produced enough material for two demos. We did a few occasional gigs around Lappeenranta but nothing bigger than that. We played together up until the year 1998 when some of the guys went into the army. That’s pretty much when the band broke up.
In the winter of 2005 me, Tuomo, Jussi and Teemu decided to revive Forge and start making new songs. I decided to take up the vocals in addition to the guitar and Teemu started playing the second guitar. We played with this line-up until the end of the summer of 2005 when Teemu decided to leave the band. We asked our former guitarist Ari if he would be interested in rejoining the band. Ari came in for two practise sessions, but being a family man, he couldn’t find the time to continue. It started to feel like we would never find a suitable guy to play the second guitar until we bumped into an old friend, Jyri Kangastalo, in a bar in Lappeenranta on a wet November night. We agreed that Jyri would join us for a band practise the next day, just to see how it goes. We didn’t have to play for long until we knew that Jyri was the right guy for our band!
Once Jyri was in the band, we started making music that was a bit different from the music we had been making before. We did a gig in the Community Centre of Lappeenranta (Monari) in February and after that we started writing songs for a new demo. We started recording the demo in the end of April and worked on it whenever we could find the time. We finished mixing it in the end of August. We did two gigs in between the recordings, the first one as an opening act for Stam1na in Night Life club in Lappeenranta and the second one in the Pallorock open-air concert, also in Lappeenranta.
At the moment we are writing new songs and our intention is to do as many gigs around Finland as possible.
So there you have it. Just a few facts about our band.
-Toni “Tone†Pulkkinen (Vocals and Guitar)
