Influences: Mammatus

Probably the biggest influence of any new band throughout the last 15 years was this "little odd band" (should be huge IMHO) from Santa Cruz County: MAMMATUS. And even tho when I say this I mean just basically their first and second album which in some way showed me that music can be kind of weird and still rocking and exciting, and doesn't have to follow any kind of stereotypical pattern at all - even though at times with SBE I think we exaggerated when we were adding part after part after part in just one song, but yeah; big influence this. 

I even tried to convince Mammatus to play a show with Samsara in SF on our first US-tour in 2009, but this didn't work out. Their rare stage appearances may be a crucial part of why they aren't more known. Nevertheless, they're a very unique band in many regards. Their drummer with his synthesizer project WAPITI later also influenced me to do my Surya-stuff. Lots of creativity here, and I'm only guessing but Mammatus seem to be influenced from Japanese 70s music like Osamu Kitajima, and Isao Tomita in particular - which are other faves of mine too.

Return to the farm (Pt.2)

Return to the farm (Pt.1)

Influences: Bland Bladen "I Grevens Tid" (2003)

While I am working on new tracks for a Surya Kris Peters-album, for some time later this year perhaps, I found a similarity to a band that I almost forgot: Bland Bladen. And here's a funny thing, I never really listened that much to this kind of jam music, long guitar noodling or pretty much anything that Samsara probably became sort of notorious for - LOL ... Well, I may have went through a rather short phase when I liked such stuff and maybe that was around the time this four track-album fell into our hands, and I say "our" because actually this CD mysteriously landed in the hands of former Terraplane singer/bassist Chris Oelke when we played at Stoned From The Underground-festival in 2003. And yes in a way Terraplane already played extended jams occasionally, when pretty much no one had a clue what was going on. Also the ultra-long version of Zepp'lins "Dazed And Confused" always left us with lots of oohs and aahs, but anyways that was pretty much that. Remember the very early 2000s were also a time when streaming, or even decent downloading was pretty much non-existent, so you listened to the CDs you had and for us that was a lot of Zepp'lin, Hendrix, Canned Heat's "Parthenogenesis and then this mysterious Bland Bladen-band from Sweden that went though lots of spins in our Harz mountain-homes.