Despite exceeding their first out of allegedly three crowdfunding campaigns by 285%, Wintersun extended their Forest package pre-order earlier last week to April 30th.
While the group continues to earn enough money for their studio and building, they announced recruiting a second guitarist, Asim Searah (Damnation Plan). Mastermind Jari Mäenpää revealed the following on their Facebook:
“Wintersun’s second guitarist is 27-year old Asim Searah. We welcome Asim to the band!
Asim was born in Pakistan and moved to Finland at the age of 18 to pursue a career in music and has been playing in several bands and projects since then.
We’ve known him for a long time and we knew he is a great singer, but we didn’t realise how talented and skillful guitar player he is. Asim was actually the first who sent us an audition video, which surprised us very positively. After the video auditions and two rounds of live auditions we realised he was exactly what we were looking for. He is very motivated and passionate with a good heavy metal attitude – a great guitar player and vocalist to improve the live sound of Wintersun even further!
Asim comments:
“It’s an honour to be a part of a band that I have looked up to for many years. It’s definitely a dream come true and I’m super excited to share the stage with Wintersun!”
Moshbit.pt recently interviewed Mäenpää asking about the campaign’s extension.
He replied:
“Yes, we have big ambitions for our massive future album projects. They are not your everyday normal albums and it would be very uneconomic, inefficient and risky to rent a 3rd party studio to record them in. So our dream is build our own studio, where we would be able to record them exactly to our vision, how we want them to sound. Which is of course what our fans want as well, the best production possible! So it is an a future investment. The studio would also be our own rehearsal place, which we haven’t had since forever. Many have thought “what makes us so special to deserve our own studio?” and I would say to them, absolutely nothing! We don’t think we deserve anything. We have made a killer product called the FOREST PACKAGE which includes our new album The Forest Seasons and now it even comes with the FOREST PACKAGE EXPANSION. It’s a killer product and insane value for the money. And we are only selling (pre-order) our product via the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign directly to our fans and are open about our future plans. And if people want to buy the product, great! Then we can maybe build the studio and so far it looks great! Looks like our dream might be coming true in the future, thanks to our dear fans!”
It seems the group are creatively driven to produce a handful bold projects. In the meantime, you can check out part four of the Forest Documentary:
