Finland's OMNIUM GATHERUM will be heading to Astia Studio in Lappeenranta, Finland this Wednesday to commence recording their fifth album, due out early next year via their new deal with Lifeforce Records.

The band has launched a studio diary at this location.

Guitarist Markus Vanhala comments: "The stars have aligned to the right places, the Finnish storms are begging more and more and the universum is waiting for this, so the time has come again for us to wake up from our coffins and switch ourselves to the studio mood, as it's time to breed and record the OG's 5th chapter of metal!

We've spent countless dark hours an' hours on composing and doing lots of pre-producing an' stuff this time for the new songs and so we're really confident and eager to get these high cultural moments on tape to be heard! It's going to the best music ever written & recorded in the planet errrr....or at least the best OG so far. The key words here are epic, massive, melodic, originality, metal!

There's also some big changes in our line-up as this is the first album with Toni "Red spear of love a ka Tsygä Ykä Z" Mäki on the low frequency department doing bass magics and also first album without our long-time guitarist Harri "Puutarhatonttu" Pikka who have mysteriously disappeared and step aside from the OG crew. Well, we wish him all the best for the left hand path what he have chosen.

The album number five will be again mixed and mastered at Unisound studio in Sweden by the mighty metal god Dan Swanö (EDGE OF SANITY, BLOODBATH, NIGHTINGALE) and it'll be recorded and co-produced by the good ol' true friend of ours, Teemu Aalto who've been working with us since the Years In Waste demo sessions spring 2004. So, the material is under the good and guiding hands!

We'll start the album sessions today as we're going to do the last pre-producing of the stuff and having the last rehearsals for this album with the whole band and Teemu the producer. These sessions will take place at an island called Munapirtti (roughly translated = cockcabin, really hehe!) in the south-eastern Finland near Kotka, where we'll be having some cabin fever, rehearsing like hell, having sauna, fishing, having sauna, 'maybe' few beers, go boating to the sea and having more sauna in the middle of the woods. We're trying here to get some more old native Finnish spirit of the woods to our music as we're playing the stuff to all the trolls, goblins, owls and spirits of the woods. By the way, it isn't going to be folk metal still."