Saturnia started off in late 96, founded by multi-instrumentalist Luis Simoes. Saturnia was originally intended to be a free art communal project where friends of several artistic professions such as literature, photography, design, painting and of course music, could come and input. One of these people was Filipe Homem, then a publicity designer, who, with Luis Simões, named the project. The name came from the merge between a couple of things: the Saturnia butterfly, the planet Saturn and saturnalia, a natural/ecological, spacey/cosmic and hedonistic concepts. This relationship was fruitful and the fusion of music with image was symbiotic.This incidental association lasted throughout 97 and out of it came the first Saturnia demo. In early 98 this duo split up friendly due to Simoes`s interest in pursuing a purely musical direction, that fused psych/prog head music of the seventies with its present day descendant: drug rave culture of drums & bass and jungle. (It was in this period that Simoes first cooperated with Francisco Rebelo both playing live and recording as guest with Cool Hipnoise) Saturnia then turned into a genuine two piece group, with Luis Simoes on guitar, sitar, theremin, vocals, gong and programming, and old time friend and musical partner Eduardo Vasconcelos (aka M Strange) on keyboards. This line up brainstormed and out of it came the first proper saturnia recording in early 99, unfortunately M Strange`s unwillingness to play live made him leave and his replacement was found in the person of Vasco Pereira, a space rock synthesist/organist and fulltime vinyl maniac.