Mastema

Hi I know that the name Mastema sounds familiar to the most of you, and there are many bands called Mastema out there. But this is the Swedish black metal band Mastema. Go ahead view the biograpy down here.
The biography of Mastema
Mastema was born from the ashes of Malicious Decay back in 1992. Malicious Decay split up about a month after recording the demo”Unholy Crusade”. In the beginning the line up of Mastema was Grim, Battle and Apollyon. Today Apollyon is the only origional member of the band since the beginning back in 92’. After about a year of hard work in 93’ the trio entered studio TBV to record their first demo ”Mefistofeles”.
In the mid 90’s Mastema moved from their home town Strömstad to a bigger city. Uddevalla was now the base for Apollyon and battle. Since their was some distance between Strömstad and Uddevalla the last page was written for Grim in the Mastema history. In Uddevalla Apollyon and Battle were rehearsing with more or less successful constellations. As time went on and they tried some guitarists only one man was good enough, Thomas”Dark” Backelin. He was now the new guitarist of Mastema and once again the band was a strong trio. Some time after Dark joined the band Chaos came along to take over the drumming so that Apollyon could focus only on being the singer of the band.
During the years 97’ and 98’ Mastema recorded two promo cd’s and both of them received very good response in the underground. Now it was time for the next man to leave the band. Battle had to move to Gothenburg and because of his condition of living he could not proceed with the band. Battle was replaced with a bassist named Anders who also was active in the band”Grief of Emerald”.
In the year 2000 Dark decided to put all his effort in his other band ”Lord Belial” and quit Mastema. His defection made it hard for the band to proceed and Mastema was to be put on ice. Apollyon focused on another band called”Soulreaper” and it seemed like Mastema was a closed chapter…… until the year 2003.
2003… the demon has risen once again. Apollyon called his old friend Carl G Karlsson and asked him if he would be interested in playing the drums with Mastema. Carl is now the drummer of the band and new plans are formed for the band. After some time Mike joins the group to play the guitar and later on another guitarist named Andreas came along. Now again Mastema was a band and some new material was to be written. In April 2005 Mastema entered Brutaliator Studio to record the promo cd ”Those who walk in darkness” with Stefan Karlsson on the studio engineering.
In late 2005 the demo was released. It was a four track promo cd with two old songs re-recorded with the new line-up and two new songs. The cd received great response in different magazines and webzines. One of Scandinavia’s biggest metalmagazines ”Close Up” gave a review and named it ”Demo of the month” and the track Bloodstained Paradise was released on the included cd.
Shortly after the release of the ”Those who walk in darkness” promo Andreas left the band. So the line-up curse continued until Mike phoned his old friend Ted (Bestial Mockery), and he joined the band. Also a guy named Erik, acquainted with Christoffer/Apollyon since some years ago, and who we met when recording the promo became a member of Mastema as the bas player.
A new year, full line-up and summer ahead, Mastema played a couple of gigs and started working on some new songs. A few bad offers from record labels came along but were turned down by the band, which was headed for a full-length album.
Our time is now… hail the curse!
/ Mastema