Finnish warlords TURISAS have issued the following update:

"We hereby announce that we have been forced to hire a step-in accordion player to replace Lisko on all announced upcoming tourdates. We have an important show this Friday at Finnish Metal Expo (FIN) and two lengthy tours in UK/Europe and USA just around the corner — but no accordion player.

"The thing is, we played a cool show in Groningen, Netherlands on 11th January and everything was cool. Then the next day, before the flight, some of us decided to check out Amsterdam really quickly, by train. Lisko had behaved in a bit hazy way during the trip, but it was nothing that weird (considering he is Lisko); however, he never showed up back at the airport. We got an interesting phone call, where he told that due to 'special' reasons he wouldn't fly in the same plane with us. This alone was pissing us off a bit, but we decided he could do it on his own expense. However, after returning to Finland, despite our attempts, there has been practically no communication with the guy, apart from a couple of interesting SMS's (so apparently he's alive): no rehearsals, nothing. We don't even know if he's back in Finland at the moment.

"This puts us in a difficult situation: with a lot of pre-arrangements like flights and visas to be done, and with all our upcoming responsibilities we have no other option than to release Lisko from his duties for an undetermined time period, starting from today. Luckily for us, we already managed to get a replacement for him on such a short warning time: the step-in accordionist for spring 2008 will be Netta Skog, who also helped us out with the latest European tour in October-November. No permanent accordion player will be added to the current line-up at this point. TURISAS also wants to point out that NO shows will be affected by the small change in the line-up."

TURISAS is set to invade North American shores this upcoming spring as part of Paganfest 2008, which also features their fellow countrymen ENSIFERUM, TYR and ELUVEITIE. This Metal Maniacs-sponsored trek, which kicks off in April, is in support of the group’s critically acclaimed new album, "The Varangian Way".