Abney Park is a steampunk band based in Seattle. The band is named after an iconic gothic cemetery, the Abney Park Cemetery in London where Robert Brown, the founder of the band, lived and studied for a period in 1988. Formerly a goth band, Abney Park has transformed their look and sound and has been called the "quintessential spokespeople for the steampunk subculture. History Early days Abney Park is the creative brainchild of Robert Brown, who formed the band in 1997 and continues to be the lead singer, principal songwriter, artistic director, and chief manager of the band. Brown released the first full-length album, Abney Park, in 1998, and in 1999 released Return to the Fire. The band's third album, Cemetery Number 1, drew from their first two albums as well as introducing several new songs. These early albums pioneered steampunk themes prior to the band's adoption of the steampunk label with lyrics depicting clockwork boys and steam-powered dystopian cities (The Change Cage and Twisted and Broken). In 1998 the Tacoma-based counter culture magazine Pandemonium first labeled Abney Park a goth band, citing their electronic sound and Robert Brown's deep baritone voice. This label stuck, and influenced the band's musical and visual style, which culminated with their 2002 release From Dreams Or Angels. Their songs The Change Cage, Black Day and No Life each reached number one on the industrial, darkwave and black metal music charts. In 2005, the band released Taxidermy, which is a collection of new versions of songs from past albums, three live tracks, and two covers. In 2006, the release of the album The Death of Tragedy marked the beginning of a major change for the band, as their music departed from a goth/pagan sound to a more world music/fusion sound. Becoming steampunk In early 2005, Robert Brown transformed Abney Park from a largely goth industrial band into a steampunk band. As Brown said on his live journal post March 13, 2005, "[We] seem to be a sort of specialized variation on steampunk, sort of a Victorian sci-fi adventurer, as if we just arrived by jet-powered zeppelin for a midnight dig just outside of Cairo in the 1900s. I'm excited because I feel like for the first time, our appearances are starting to capture the same level of imagination and exotic tones the music and lyrics always have." As part of that transformation, fictional identities were created for the main performers; e.g., Robert Brown became known as Captain Robert. Since steampunk is largely derived from science fiction and fantasy literature, a fictional backstory was created to set a stage for their new music. According to that story (as told in The Wrath of Fate: Book 1 of The Airship Pirate Chronicles, by Robert Brown), the band's plane collided with a time-travelling dirigible called HMS Ophelia, said to have been created by a Dr. Leguminous Calgori in a freak storm. The band commandeered the vessel, deciding to become airship pirates, and formed a new band from the surviving members of the crash. Much of their music since that time has been based around this fictional backstory. "The new, eclectic sound is attributed to the strange instruments and exotic musical influences lifted from the numerous locations and eras they have visited in the airship Ophelia, featuring "clockwork guitars, belly dancers, flintlock bassists, Middle-Eastern percussion, violent violin, and Tesla powered keyboards blazing in a post-apocalyptic, swashbuckling, Steampunk musical mayhem." Their music has also appeared in several movie soundtracks, including Insomnis Amour, Goth, and Lord of the Vampires. The Abney Park song Sleep Isabella was used in a scene in the HBO series True Blood, Season 5 Episode 4.