A Void is one of the old songs that were pilled up for ages… Funnily enough my main influences for the song were quite thrash-metal from my wild young youth…

And it’s a celebration of loss and affliction… At some point I tried to rewrite the lyrics in a lipogrammatic fashion like Georges Perec‘s novel of the same name, something I will have to upload here when I retrieve it from my notes! I remember years ago, my supervisor in a bar I was working telling me I really like your music, I just don’t get why it should be that depressing… And when it was released we would get feedback from people telling us that they cried after listening to it, exactly as it happened with Next Illusion to Fade…

The diminished chord in the main theme wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for Slayer‘s seasons in the abyss and the narrative-like singing in retrospect could be influenced by Dave Mustaine‘s performance in Dawn Patrol out of their Rust in Peace album… Totally unconventional, someone would expect Van Morrison or The Rolling Stones but yeah… Our blood was boiling when we were teenagers…

And a few words about our grim Yellow Submarine-like masterpiece, animated by Afsoon Sahriari that has caused some pretty diverse reactions…

Afsoon had listened to our music and really loved it, so we decided we would do something together, and everybody on the Phase camp should come with some story ideas, but nobody did their homework aside from the Saint‘s girlfriend at the time who came up with a story about a music video with actors we never did in the end.

So when the deadline we’ve set for ourselves had passed I came up with that story on the spot, merging depression, narcissism, autism, social dynamics, mysticism, conspiracy theories, pop culture, role models, Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton‘s macabre universe… and all that jazz… It was our first video ever… I must have had me thinking:

”Great! Now let’s put everything we’ve ever encountered in it, as if there’s no tomorrow!”

 

When I was a pre-teen in the early nineties, my uncle got me a book by Litsa Psarafti that had recently been awarded, and it was about  some teenagers that met and fell in love, while the heroine was at the Giza plateau as a tourist, and they find them selves entangled in a great mystery they are allured to solve… And all that before Dan Brown‘s best seller…

Later on in life I would binge on anything I could find on ancient Egypt, from really dated encyclopedias my elder cousins owned etc. to books, to the typical ‘esoteric’ magazines with insufficient if any at all bibliographical references and credibility. Way before Wikipedia… Even marginally before Encarta…

I remember I owned a Greek translation of Andre Pochan‘s ‘L ‘Enigme de la Grande Pyramide‘ which I loved until I had it lent to someone and didn’t see it again.

For some unknown reason the local telly had broadcast either a talk or a documentary of Graham Hancock‘s in late 90’s about how the pyramids are an astrological map, the preceding of the equinoxes, the Orion‘s belt  alignment with one of the shafts of the great pyramid etc. and I remember I was really blown away by the fact that he didn’t seem crazy like his Greek equivalents, no matter how far-fetched some of his theories were, and how well spoken he was. By the way, I didn’t know who he was until I stumbled upon one of his recent talks, and while I have to admit he is still intriguing, he is proposing even more unconventional ideas about the benefits of the ‘ayahuascan experience’ and so on…

And I can’t stress how much I was really interested in how mystery works… Like every other teenager really, being intrigued by and totally going for it, is like some sort of a rite of passage; like a ritualistic exploration of our own mortality. It’s an amazing device, and the cornerstone of every religion… It’s met in initial stages of courting, in various expressions of art…

Somewhat 10 years ago, a friend had lent me Foucault’s Pendulum and by browsing it a bit I realised how he got the story wrong, or at least how he completely dismissed Umberto Eco‘s criticism in that lengthy work oh his… I really have so many cautionary tales of how cognitive bias works like that one, and how people are seeking affirmation on their strangest theories they’d encounter in the strangest places, from things I’ve witnessed throughout my life, which is better if they are left out of this blog.

Then something else happened to us when we actively started playing and we licenced our debut single Perdition to Microsoft. We didn’t get a gig because we were accused of that thing being product of  Masonic lobbying of ours or whatever… We laughed at it of course, but we still wanted to take a proper piss out of it, like the Beatles would do with any rumour about them… It happened that every time we were introducing anyone to the Paul is Dead hoax just for the crack, we’d recognise how powerful that was, even if it is utter bollocks,  and we though that it’s amazing how they played along with it! So it was a tad of that, and a bit of my childhood’s fascination with Egypt…