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

Just not to be repeated:

Back in 2004, when I set out to re-form the band with my good friend Chris Gioldasis, we began writing new songs. I brought a few of my ideas, which eventually evolved into tracks like The Smile and Next Illusion to Fade as well as some other songs including ones yet to be recorded. In return, Chris showed me a sitar melody he had composed, inspired by a video game he was playing at the time. I went home and developed a song from it, which became Perdition.

(you can find the rest of the excerpt here)

I finished the lyrics in no time, a process I had previously found both difficult and, until that point, unfruitful. I remember something my good friend and local hero, Panos Dimitriou (check out his band for some seriously well-played heavy metal), once told me. At the time, he was someone everyone in the music scene looked up to, and he said something like, “Don’t waste time trying to write; use it to experience something worth writing about.” Whether I wanted to or not, it seems I took his advice to heart and “stepped into that endless fire” without any precautions. To be fair, his exact words were more of a casual observation about how experiences are necessary to have something to say, but I took them as an imperative.

At the time, I had no prior experience writing lyrics, so I just let the song unfold on its own, as David Byrne describes how songs do. I let it take me wherever it needed to go—much like free writing in André Breton‘s surrealism or Sigmund Freud‘s psychoanalytic theory. When anything comes from you, it must, logically, reflect something about your perspective on life. The real question in art is whether others can relate to what you’ve created and if it can make their own perspective richer. If so, that’s a great success for an artist.

Maya Angelou once said, “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.” And while the bird’s song might mostly serve to attract mates (as Charles Darwin would argue), we as humans are hopefully more than that. The modern Greek word for song, τραγούδι (tragoudi), comes from ‘tragedy,’ which, according to Nietzsche, is the highest form of art. In these small, brief works, we are called to share the small tragedies of the human experience, allowing people to compare their own lives and find solidarity, maybe even exorcising their existential dread by realizing they are not alone. Recent studies have even shown that sad songs can have a deeper emotional effect, further adding layers to this purpose.

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

The song remained unfinished for quite a while until I met Alex on the course we were on together at the time, 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 ourselves. 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 who features in its parent album also has recorded some stuff for Ion there. This version can still be heard on Perdition single on Spotify.

• Perdition was a part of Microsoft‘s marketing campaign Playlist 7 which 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 creating 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 an end in 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 months 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 of the frame, and the surface is blurred in the same fashion Windows 7 windows do when they are not in the foreground.

• Even though Dimitris, the drummer at the time is listed as recording the drum tracks as a sign of good-will for joining the band, it was Alex and I who came up with most of the drum parts, where they were not already developed by Jim Lytras. I was responsible for composing Perdition‘s drum parts, and we consulted a friend and old bandmate Spiros Anyfantis, who helped with a bit of a drummer’s perspective in this one.