Cult of Luna emerged from the ashes of the infamous hardcore act Eclipse. When the band split up, vocalist Klas Rydberg along with guitarist Johannes Persson had new ideas how to explore music further on. A new band had come to light, soon to be called Cult of Luna.
After some member hunting and rehearsal, Cult of Luna had their first line-up and some ideas on the sound; raw, heavy and with total darkness. The first line-up consisted of: Klas, Johannes, Erik, Magnus and Fredrik. Fredrik joined the cult for a while but had to leave due to some personal difficulties.
When practice started to pay off, CoL hit the studios for the first time and recorded a two-track demo. (January 1999)
After some more rehearsal and after the first gig, the band felt that to fully live out their wet dreams of sound experimenting, one more member was needed to handle the samples. Since Magnus had both knowledge and equipment, he was written. Given that Magnus had handled the drums earlier, we needed a new drummer. And that we found in a mutual friend, his name was Marco and he had previous helped us out with more primitive sample engineering on live performances. After Fredrik was dismissed we found a new bass player, also through mutual friends, and that was Axel. So that was the new line-up and still is to this date.
The frequency of rehearsals was pretty low and therefore also live performances. The fact that the band members lives in different cities made it hard to give priority to write new material or to do live shows. (To this date Cult of Luna have done 25 gigs)
Another mutual friend helped CoL to release their first record. Tim, head of trust no one recordings released the first record which was a 7" split vinyl with friends Switchblade.
Following a concert at the Trästock festival '00, UK label Rage of Achilles got in contact with Cult of Luna. After some negotiation, RoA was to release Cult of Luna's debut full-length album. Release date was September 14th. 2001.
Throughout the few years of existing, Hydra Head records have shown some interest in Cult of Luna and this co-operation has result in a two-track 7" colored vinyl on HH records released march 24th. 2002.
Source: http://www.cultofluna.com/