The very first song we finished, the first to rehearse and the first to play live. The most discussed one and the most characteristic of our fairly unique style.

Just not to be repeated:

”Back in 2004, when I tried to form the band with my good friend Chris Gioldasis and decided to write new songs, I brought a few of my ideas some of which evolved to what “The Smile” or “Next Illusion to Fade” is nowadays or even more songs still to be recorded and in return he showed me a sitar melody he composed inspired from a video game we was playing at the time. I went back home and developed a song out of it and to make the story short the song was “Perdition””

(you can find the rest of the excerpt here)

I had finished the lyrics all at once while in the past I was finding the process quite overwhelming and up till then quite fruitless. I recall a saying a good friend and local hero, Panos Dimitriou (check his band out for proper played heavy metal), who everyone with aspirations around the music field looked up to, telling me back then; something like:  ‘don’t waste your time trying to write but use it to experience something to write about’. And fortunately or not it appears as if I subconsciously took the advice and stepped into that endless fire without taking the precautions. To be fair, the exact quote was more like you have to have experiences in order to write something but I took it in, in its imperative form.

Having no previous experience in writing lyrics at the time, I just had let the song unfold itself, like David Byrne says songs do, and take me where it had to… Just like free writing on André Breton’s surrealism or Sigmund Freud‘s psychoanalytic theory. It comes out through you, so it must have something to say about you and your worldview. Then with art the questions are if can people relate to that or not ad if it can make their view fuller… If it’s the last case you’ve won…  Maya Angelou once wrote: ‘A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.’ but beautiful as this may seem, I’d say on most occasions birds sing because they are high and/or want to get laid. We are more than that… The modern Greek word for song τραγούδι (tragoudi) derives from ‘tragedy’ that according to Nietzsche it is the highest form of art. In these small brief works we are called to present the small tragedies of the human experience for people to compare themselves with and affirm and celebrate their existence through it. Not to mention what recent studies revealed about sad songs and get further carried away and make this even bigger than it was meant to be.

Not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg but the song is partly inspired by Pythagoras‘ analogy of life compared to a fair as in festival.

The song remained unfinished for quite a while, until I met Alex through the course we were doing together, and he added the trippy arpeggiators in the background as well as the lead solo.

• It was the first song we’ve rehearsed as a full band back in 2008 and it features in every show ever since. On our unplugged shows its opening verse features, often slightly altered, as part of the acoustic version of the Smile.

• It’s the only song so far that was mixed and mastered by someone other than our-selves, since we thought ”fuck it, we can do it and take all the blame on us…” Namely it was Vangelis Yalamas who did it at Fragile studios (in late 2009), where the vocal tracks for the song were also recorded. Duncan Patterson that features in it’s parent album also has recorded some stuff for Ion there. This song’s version can be heard on Perdition single on Spotify.

• Perdition was a part of a Microsoft‘s marketing campaign called Playlist 7 that used artist’s music to promote Widows 7. We just accepted the gig to make things more official teaming up with the software developing colossal and create further cross-linking that would discourage newer bands that would covet the band’s name from claiming it. Let alone the cash… Money isn’t a end itself for us, but a man’s got to eat! It was released under this particular program, on February the 15th, 2010 right after our second full-band gig ever, about 10 moths before In Consequence‘s release.

• The cover Aris Liapis has done, features the beautiful Amber Jackson as another Alice Through the Looking Glass that features the min/max/close buttons on the top right corner and the frame and surface is blurred in the same fashion Windows 7 windows do when they are not in the foreground.

• Even though my cousin Dim and drummer at the time is listed as recording the drum tracks as a sign of good-will for joining the band, it was me and Alex who thought of most of the rhythms. I was responsible for Perdition and we retreated to friend and old bandmate Spiros Anyfantis‘ help for a drummers touch i this one.