Justin Marler
Justin Marler (born July 29, 1972) is an American musician. He is known for being a founding member of the stoner rock band Sleep and for leaving a burgeoning career in music to become a monk in an Eastern Orthodox monastery. In 1990, Marler joined the members of a little-known band called Asbestosdeath (with Al Cisneros, Chris Hakius and Matt Pike), which the members later renamed Sleep. Soon after recording Sleep's first full-length record, "Volume One", Marler vanished, while the band went on to become metal icons. Marler turned up at St. Herman of Alaska  Monastery in northern California and was later transferred to a monastery on a nearly-deserted island in Alaska. During his seven-year stint as a monk, he founded the widely distributed zine titled "Death to the World". The zine had a considerable impact on youth counterculture during the mid- to late-1990s, which caught the attention of the mainstream press and quickly led to the release of Marler's first book, "Youth of the Apocalypse", which he co-authored with a fellow monastic. In 1999, Marler left his reclusive life in the monastery and returned to California where he restarted his  music career, with former Sleep bandmate Chris Hakius, as the lead singer for an alternative band called The Sabians. Marler then moved to Austin, Texas in 2005 where he remained a musician and publishing author, active in the Austin music scene with his current band, Shiny Empire.