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:	post by the_reverend at 2017-02-14 15:37:58

It's with a heavy heart i'm typing this text on the keyboard. Tears are falling down my cheek and it hurts in my entire body. In the background i have the song ”Demons” by 8th Sin, and all my memories are coming back in a mess of images inside my head. I feel sick, even though i am actually doing fine physically.

I met Tony Särkkä/IT (or whatever you decide to call him) back in 1987. We were both typical angry teenagers ready to upset the world as much as possible. We had similar taste to heavy music and shared the interest in playing. He regularly came to me with his guitar and asked me to show him how to play different songs. Most of them were by bands like S.O.D, Anthrax, Metallica or any other from the late 80’s thrash wave that were the absolute coolest thing one would listen to at the time. In 1988 i formed a band together with Dan Swanö and a few other friends, and one day i rang his doorbell to ask him to become our lead singer. He accepted immediately and that’s when our common musical journey started that lasted for the rest of our life together. The band was ”Brejn Dedd”, a thrash band with strong influences by any angry-heavy-fast-playing thrash band of the 80’s, with a touch of teenage-humor. We never took the band that seriously, but we had a really good time together. Tony just exploded with new ideas every week and we had many late nights discussing ideas about the band. Many times he ended up sleeping on the couch in my small apartment. I had to call his mum and say he was okay and also make sure he dragged his lazy ass to school the next day before i went to work myself. Brejn Dedd disbanded in 1991 after a few successful years of shows and recordings.

Early 90’s, Tony broadened his musical visions and became interested in more extreme sorts of metal, and formed bands like Abruptum and later on also Ophthalamia and Vondur, among other projects. I went in a completely different direction myself, but as we had found each other on so many different levels, we didn’t have to be in the same band or even listen to the same music to keep our bonds tight. We were like brothers. In 1995 i produced the first Vondur album together with Tony. We recorded it in my living room and he wrote on the album that it was done in ”Helevete Studios”. A typical move from Tony, always with a smile on his face. We had a really good time and loads of laugh creating Stridsyfirlysing, that were done completely in Icelandic. He thought it was the coolest language in the world and really tried to study it as much as he could before recording the album. He was constantly telling me the sound was ”too good” and the songs were ”too slow”. We were laughing together as we speed up the tempo of the programmings and made the sound as bad as we possibly could. We recorded everything right there in my living-room, even Jim was recording the violin there. Neighbours must’ve been terrified. In 1996 we did part of it again as i programmed everything for the second album ”The galactic rock n roll empire” but it was recorded in Abyss studio.
The same year i produced the Ophthalamia album ”To Elishia” (released later in 1997) which were a collection of all early demos remastered and summed up on one album. Tony kept coming over to me every now and then with a plastic bag of cassette tapes he had found in the basement, and wanted to include them all no matter the quality.

The 90’s were a time when we hang out almost daily. But this was also a time when things started to escalate around his person, and in the second half of the 90’s Tony reached a turning point in his life. Things got to its extreme and he decided to make a drastic move from the scene that he was part of creating, and to temporary leave Sweden. He went on a journey around the world to explore new views in life, new places, and new visions. Time to think and to evolve as a person. This is where he turned the page and entered into a new chapter in life. We kept contact all the time, no matter how far he went. Once a week an email popped up with a full report on what was going on, sometimes with pictures, and i had to do the same at my end. He was always the same Tony for me, but for the outside world he was going through changes.

Around 1999-2000 he came back to Sweden again and immediately we found ourselves in my studio throwing ideas at each other again. He was so full of creativity and it was now 10 years since we made music together, and we were both older and had new visions and experiences. I had made lots of electronical/synth stuff since last time and he had made lots of extreme black/death/dark stuff and we agreed we should combine our musical minds. We formed 8th Sin, that was his idea of the biggest sin of all seven sins combined; humanity. We worked really hard writing songs and trying to find our sound for about four years. I was doing the music and production while he was the creative mastermind of lyrics and stories. Just like he had created Ophthalamia that was a fantasy world he invented in the 90’s, now he had a new platform to express himself. We had weekends where we literally lived in my studio until the smell was unbearable. Tony seemed to have endless energy. In 2004 the first 8th Sin album ”Sinners Inc” were finally released, followed up by the second album ”Angelseed & Demonmilk” in 2005 and the third album was planned to be released in 2006.

In time for the release of the first album in November 2004 we put a band together. Johan Husgafvel was Tonys first choice as bass player and he said that Johan was "so cool!". Tony had met him for the first time on my 30th birthday three years earlier. The rest of the band was found by online advertisment and we immediately started to work on the second album all together. Tony was so happy to have a band again, and as none of his previous bigger bands (like Abruptum, Ophthalamia or Vondur) made any live appearances, he was so excited to do shows with 8th Sin. The first show we did was in January 2005 as the opening act for our mutual friend Peter Tägtgren and his band Pain - it was actually through Tony i had got to know Peter in the early 90s. After the release of the second album in November 2005 we started to work on what was supposed to be the third album. Tony loved to rehearse with the boys and i always picked him up in my car and we went there together. He was always so full of energy when we did this, and afterwards in the car back home we discussed how it went.

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