Wintersun frontman / mastermind Jari Mäenpää has checked in with the following update:

"There's been many requests for updates on what's been happening. We have been updating and answering questions, but apparently people are not seeing these updates because of the Facebook algorithms. We hope that this update would reach as many people as possible, so there would be less confusion about what's going on with Wintersun. In order to reach many people, please do share this post, comment and like! This will kick the algorithm's ass!

Since the release of The Forest Seasons we have been dealing with the aftermath of our crowdfunding and we've been on touring mode for almost 3 years. The touring period was also quite the challenge with lot of big changes going on in the band: Introducing a new guitar player to the band (Asim), Jari dropping the live guitar, finding a new live crew, new live gear setups, rehearsing with new members, creating and dealing with new merch, all the tour arrangements and logistics, etc.

Also, we had to find session players to cover for Kai, since he has been very busy with Nightwish. We were very lucky to have such great drummers like Timo, Rolf and Heikki to help us out! Also we were lucky to find amazing people for our live crew. So with a lot of "moving parts" the three years were a big challenge and the busiest we've ever been, but luckily in the end everything went quite smoothly, so we are very thankful!

I've been dealing with a lot of big life changes too. One of them has been moving to a new place where I am currently building a temporary 'semi studio' and also building a whole new DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) setup from scratch in order to make albums more efficiently. The 'semi studio' and the new DAW are almost finished and hopefully won't take too much time anymore. There will be more updates on this when everything is finished.

About new music and Time II

You want the good news or the bad news first? Ok, let's go with the bad first...

So right now the music making is just starting after the long and intensive touring period. I have still worked on music every chance I've gotten (which hasn't been a lot unfortunately). Right now I'm working on four new albums. Yes, one of the four albums is Time II. I've tried to work on it with the new Mac Pro and I was really hoping that the new Mac Pro would solve the issue of lack of CPU power, but even the new 16-core Mac Pro can't really handle these huge projects very well. Which was a huge disappointment. The projects open with 90% CPU usage without even plugins in the projects yet. So the projects already are very slow and once I start to add plugins in order to mix the CPU starts to spike, so I don't know what to tell you. I don't want to compromise to mix it only with couple of light plugins, like I had to mix Time I. Also I haven't found a proper kick, snare and rhythm guitar sound for this album yet and I've been looking like crazy! So I'm not really excited at all to start mixing Time II until I find these essential sounds and have more CPU to mix. And without a proper studio (a proper mixing room with proper acoustic treatment) it is incredible difficult to mix this kinda heavily layered stuff anyways.

Here's the good news...

There are also three other new albums that I'm working on and I'm very excited about these projects. One is the 'space metal' project that I've already talked about a little bit. One is a more 'traditional Wintersun' style album, kinda mix between the debut and Time albums, but also with lots of new dimensions and some of the best melodies I've ever written! The third album style I want to keep a secret for now, gotta have some mystery! But it's probably the one that I'm the most excited about currently and the one that has been progressing the fastest. I've got a whole concept for it (a whole new Wintersun world) and I've already written a lot of lyrics for it as well, but I don't know yet if it will be the next one. I'm working on all these albums in turns, because I get bored and 'foggy' if I work on the same project / same songs for too long. But right now this project already has a killer mix going, it has the RIGHT sounds. Which is great, because that's always the hardest part for me making an album (especially finding a good kick, snare and the rhythm guitar sound).

Now, I don't know when any of these albums will be finished or released, there are no promises! I'm just starting out after a long chaotic period. A new Wintersun album might come sooner or later or it might not ever come! You'll never know the future! I want to make these albums without too much pressure and enjoy the process, so there won't be compromises like there always have been in the past, which have left me in huge disappointments and taken away some of the enthusiasm to make music.

I can say this though... thanks to our crowdfunding and the amazing support from you guys, things have been progressing much more nicely than ever before. I'm really having goosebumps again and chills working on new music and having fun with it! Being able to build this 'semi studio' is helping me and the process a lot! It's not a full on studio yet, but parts of this 'semi studio' is already a dream come true for me! So thank you! You guys are the best!

Once any of these albums is finished, we will start updating more about the release and the new crowdfunding. So please stay patient for now. There will be more updates here and there about the progress. So stay EverTuned!"

Thanks!"