Interview with Caelestia

The second album by Caelestia, Beneath Abyss, is a much more interesting listen than you might expect from a band who ostensibly appear to be a Symphonic/Gothic Metal band, but in reality have a lot more going on than that…

For those who are unfamiliar with your band – introduce yourself!

We are a progressive / symphonic extreme metal band from Athens, Greece. The band was initially formed in April 2012, by founding members Nick Palivos (bass / vocals) and Dimitra Vintsou (lead vocals). The band released its second studio album “Beneath Abyss”, on February 16th, 2015 under Finnish Label “Inverse Records”. The album was recorded and mixed at “Basement Studios” (with sound engineer Michalis Meleteas) in Athens, and mastered at the renowned “Fascination Street Studios” in Sweden, by Tony Lindgren. We have undergone some line-up changes, since the band was initially formed, before we end up in the present 6-member line-up (Nick Palivos – vocals, Dimitra Vintsou – vocals, Vassilis Thomas – guitars, Vangelis Evangelou – guitars, Stelios Varotsakis – bass and Socratis Panagouleas – drums).

Give us a bit of background to Caelestia

The band was initially formed in April 2012, as we mentioned before. The first band line up consisted (besides Nick and Dimitra) of Panos Varvaropoulos (guitars), Haris Kyriakopoulos (guitars) and Aggelos Kousakis (drums). A first studio album titled “Last Wish” was released in the end of 2012, under independent label IKK Productions (the band was still called “Me And Myself” then). The title song “Last Wish” became our first official video, which was directed by Christos Tsoukalas (Basement Studios), and released in September 2013. In the summer of 2013, the band changed its name to ‘Caelestia”. The decision to change the band name came naturally, after the line-up was finalized, and –most important- after the musical direction and genre was changed to symphonic / progressive extreme metal (not to mention the fact that the new name was better sounding).

What are your influences?

Our band’s sound contains influences by many styles of metal, such as death, progressive, gothic, symphonic, black and thrash. One can easily distinguish such passages in our album’s songs, and this is something we cherish a lot, not to mention that it gives us a unique sound. There are many bands that we can name as influences; needless to say that each contributing band member has his/her own influences. If we were asked to name a few, we ‘d say our very own Septic Flesh, Moonspell, Death, Dimmu Borgir, Behemoth, Katatonia, Hypocrisy, Cradle Of Filth, Rotting Christ, Nightwish, Epica, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Morbid Angel…

What are you listening to at the moment that you would like to recommend?

A lot of different things, since every member of our band has his/her different influences and likes. A couple of albums (which came out in 2015) that keep playing in our iPods are: “Shadows Of The Dying Sun” (Insomnium), “Extinct” (Moonspell), “Shadow World” (Wolfheart), “Ylem” (Dark Fortress), “Labyrinth” (Fleshgod Apocalypse) just to name a few….

Give us a bit of background to Beneath Abyss – any particular concepts or ideas you want to discuss?

Our music and lyrics explore a wide variety of subjects, with the main focus being in the eternal war between good and evil, light and darkness, either taking place internally, thus within an individual’s soul and thoughts, either externally, in the outside world, not leaving aside subjects, such as disrupted states of mind, occult etc. We also tried to give a certain theatrical sense in our song lyrics, introducing dialogues (e.g. in the track “Mi Ultima Vida”) between characters, and lyrics written in Spanish and Latin, besides English. That is a key element in our lyrics and music, which we plan to continue and expand in our future work. In our new album, we have strived to achieve a well-balanced combination of the styles, that each of the band members favours, thus melodic death metal, symphonic / gothic metal, visible elements of progressive metal, but also black metal passages. The goal was head on to achieve a unique style of our own, and not try to sound like an impression of any other band, which is quite difficult nowadays.

How do you go about writing your songs?

Our music is greatly based on diversity, large amounts of guitar riffing and phrasing (it is quite indicative that each of our songs contains at least 7-8 different guitar riffs), changing time signatures and varying tempos, that range from 130 to 210 bpm. We tried hard to break the so called “conventional” form of songwriting (intro / verse / chorus / verse / chorus / solo / chorus / outro etc), and introduce various and altering parts and bridges in our songs, so that the listener is constantly left curious of what’s going to come next. That is quite a big turn compared to our previous album, which could easily be characterized as alternative / gothic metal, with more “conventionally” written songs, and not so many complicated passages, bridges and altering time signatures.

How did the recording process go?

Surely the process of making “Last Wish”, and the experience that came thereof, helped us in the recording of “Beneath Abyss”. However, there was a significant difference in the recording process of “Beneath Abyss”; what most bands usually do, is book a certain amount of bulk time at a studio, and then go record their album as a whole. What we did, is to break that “norm”, by recording each track, after we had already finalized its song-writing process. This meant that the tracks for “Beneath Abyss” were recorded with approx. 7-days intervals between each one of them. During these intervals, we finalized, re-considered and edited parts in each track, so that the final outcome was what exactly the band wanted (from a musical and structural point of view). In this way, the process of the recording may have taken a little longer than usual, but it gave us the ability to control every aspect, and do changes and corrections at the same time, ensuring that the outcome was “complete” to our ears.

What’s your favourite song on the album and why?

Oh, that’s a difficult and tricky question… All of the band members have their personal favourite among the tracks in the album, and that’s because not one of the included tracks can be characterized as mere “filler”. If we were to choose, we’d say track 1 (Malleus Maleficarum – The Secret Cult) and track 5 (Beneath Abyss). That is, because the aforementioned songs contain all the elements of the band’s new musical direction and sound: fast and altering tempos, aggressive and dark guitar riffing, progressive passages, melodic bridges and haunting orchestral background.

What does the future hold for Caelestia?

We just finished a great support show in Athens (Gagarin Club 205) on November 14th, opening (as a sole support act) for Swedish melodic death metallers Arch Enemy, which was nearly sold-out, and which constituted a very powerful and intense experience on its own. We recently engaged in cooperation with world renowned promoting agency “Clawhammer PR”, who launched a second round of global promotion for “Beneath Abyss” (we got big expectations on that one!). There are two more Athens shows and a mini-Greek tour coming up in the beginning of 2016, whereas we are scheduling appearances at various European festivals in 2016. At the same time, we continue working on the pre-production of new material (we already have 4 songs ready for our next album). Last but not least, we are scheduling to make our second official video in January 2016, for the track “The Rise Of The Hidden Nature”, with renowned German director Matthias Kollek (Kreator, Lacrimosa etc).

Official website:
http://caelestiaband.com

Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/caelestiaband