Hey lovely peeps! I was updating our biography for our upcoming release (titled “Dissemination”, out October 13th!) and I thought I’d share it here. So here’s Joviac’s story in a nutshell 2022:
Long Biography
“Honesty, sincerity and freedom of expression.”
Joviac was formed in late 2016 by frontman Viljami Jupiter Wenttola as
a necessary artistic outlet. With a strong vision and an unrelenting
compulsion to express himself through the medium of music, he set out
to form Joviac.
The first album, simply titled “Joviac”, was recorded as a two man effort
with bassist Antti Varjanne. The goal was to get the ball rolling and hit
the ground running with a handful of songs to show what the band was
all about while still searching for the rest of the lineup.
“I founded Joviac because I needed to. No matter the moniker or
channel, I was always looking for ways to express myself and relate to
people through music. I learned through years of trial and error that I
needed to start a band where I could write the kind of music that I
needed to write and say what I needed to say. It’s that freedom that
also makes Joviac’s music very personal and sincere. It’s honest and
driven only by my core values instead of aesthetics or external factors.”
-Viljami Jupiter Wenttola
The project quickly grew into a full-fledged band in 2017 with the
addition of Rudy Fabritius on drums and Janne Korpela as a live
second guitarist. The band started playing shows around Finland and
quickly gained attention and some underground notoriety.
In 2018 the band released their first recorded work as a full band. The
single, titled “State Of Mind” was a brilliant mission statement of things
to come while they refined their live set further and kept working on
new material.
It was unfortunately at this time that live guitarist Janne Korpela would
depart the band.
“We loved having Janne on board and our chemistries worked really
well, but unfortunately it wasn’t meant to be. Janne wasn’t comfortable
becoming a full fledged member in a band that wasn’t playing his own
music, and meanwhile I wanted something more than just a session live
guitarist. Plus Janne has his own career in music production, and you
only have 24 hours in a day.” -Viljami
In 2020 the band released their sophomore effort, titled
“Here And Now”. The band had come forward immensely and the
album delved deeper into every direction Joviac was known for with
even more expression, emotion, nuance and flavour.
“Here And Now” reached #8 on the official physical album chart of
Finland and garnered favourable reviews and critical acclaim in the
progressive metal scene.
“I’m super proud of “Here And Now”. In fact in many ways I regard it as
our first proper album. It made our first record feel more like a glorified
demo to be honest, even if those songs hold a very special place in my
heart even still. I do go back and listen to the first record every now and
then and it’s never quite as rough as I remember it, and I do think that if
your latest album puts the one before it to shame, you’re definitely
going in the right direction. It’s a shame that we weren’t able to tour to
support “Here And Now” as much as we would’ve wanted to on
account of the pandemic, but no one could’ve seen that coming.”
-Viljami
The pandemic came and forced Joviac to stop and reflect, to think
about what they wanted from their future as a band. Even though
everything came to a halt, there was a small silver lining.
“I decided to turn the pandemic pause into an opportunity rather than
to rest on my laurels. The question of “should we have a keyboard
player” had nagged me since day 1, and I figured that if we’re not going
to be playing live for an undetermined amount of time, we might as well
finally ask ourselves that question.
I had asked Tuomas Honkkila if he wanted to join the band in 2016
when Joviac was nothing yet but an idea forming in my head. At the
time Tuomas felt that he couldn’t commit so I gave up trying to find a
keyboardist and henceforth allocated keys onto backing tracks when
we played live. Synths were always there in our music but at a very
background type of role.
After posting a public wanted-ad looking for a keyboard player I was
pleasantly surprised to see that Tuomas had applied, and after a couple
of jam sessions at our rehearsal space, I was satisfied that this was our
guy.
At the same time we had come to the conclusion that Joona Niemi, the
guitarist who replaced Janne Korpela as our live guitarist a couple years
ago wasn’t the right fit for the band. It was nothing personal, that’s just
how these things go sometimes. Every band has certain roles for
certain members and I have to admit that when it comes to Joviac, I
can be a real control freak. It just came to the point that I wanted an
official second guitarist instead of just a live member, and in order for
Joona to take that leap, he would’ve needed to play a role that I wasn’t
comfortable casting him in.” -Viljami
The band received many applications from people interested in the
guitarist slot, but it was Viljami’s old classmate from Tampere University
Of Applied Sciences, Johannes Leipälä who got the job in the end.
“I had met Johannes in university, and even though we weren’t close
friends then, I remembered that working together with him on a metal
Abba cover school project was fun! I knew from experience that
personal chemistries either make or break a band. It’s all about how you
work together that determines how far you go. Luckily Johannes was
also a rad guitarist and learned our material quickly, the choice was
never a very tough one.” -Viljami
While the band got used to the new lineup and rehearsed their existing
catalogue, they managed to write and record two songs that they would
release as stand alone singles in 2021 and 2022.
“”The Fine Line” and “Dissemination” were meant as kind of two sides
of the same coin. They’re totally different from each other but reflect the
feelings and times of the pandemic era. “The Fine Line” being a very
hopeful and positively charged song and “Dissemination” being… Well
the complete opposite.
I poured all of my covid fear and anxiety into “Dissemination” as the
dark cloud of the pandemic was crawling towards us from the horizon.
It was written very early pandemic and the feeling of not knowing what
was going to happen was weighing heavily on all our minds. The
scariest part of all for me personally wasn’t the disease itself, but the
amount of misinformation and disinformation around the subject. It
taught me that words can be a lot more dangerous than a disease and
spread much faster.” -Viljami