Jussi Antero Sydänmaa is a Finnish guitarist, better known by his stage name Amen or Finnish nickname Eiska. He is one of the founding members of the Finnish metal band Lordi and is still playing in the band. He graduated as an Information Technology engineer in 2001 and has been making the website of Lordi. Amen plays Schechter guitars. The municipality of Mäntsälä granted Amen with statue named "Hard Rock Stone" on 26 June 2006. Amen has been featured as a special guest on Markus Striegls concert in 2011 and Doro Pesch's concert in 2014. Amen has also recorded guitar riffs which were used by Ari Pulkkinen to create the soundtrack for PC game Shadowgrounds. His acoustic guitar solos "Amen's Lament to Ra" and "Amen's Lament to Ra ll" were included on Lordi's albums Babez for Breakfast and Scare Force One.
Character
Amen's character in Lordi is an ancient mummy avenger, the god of gods. Most known names of Amen's character are The Ruler of the Anubis Dynasty and The Mummified One. The fictional history of Amen tells that he was the great Egyptian god. After death Amen was mummified and couple thousands years later he was woken up to play in Lordi. Amen's public secret is women. He's an ancient lover.
Biography
Jussi Sydänmaa was born on 26 June 1972 in Espoo, Finland, but spent his childhood and youth in Mäntsälä. He was interested in the guitar even before he began school. Sydänmaa's first contact with the band Kiss was in 1983 with the Lick It Up album. He was a passionate fan of Kiss, and he was bullied at school because of this. At the age of 5, Jussi Sydänmaa got his first acoustic guitar and started guitar lessons. He enjoyed learning the instrument and how to play songs he liked, but he was too embarrassed to participate in his guitar play test. This experience shook young Sydänmaa, who gave up playing the guitar. Sydänmaa picked the guitar back up ten years later, when he began taking an interest in hard rock music. As a young man, Sydänmaa played in various bands. The most promising was the Rag Flag, but they did not attain success. At the age of 25, Sydänmaa had come to the conclusion that the various rock-projects he participated in contributed to his failure. He went on to study newspaper and work in radio and later, commercial media communications. Sydänmaa completed a degree in 2001 in media technology engineering. After graduation, Sydänmaa did not go on to work in that field, as he had joined Lordi in the late 90s, and they had made their breakthrough in 2002. Because of Lordi's success, Sydänmaa decided to leave the IT engineering work to focus his career with Lordi.
