After the early momentum with your 2016 EP and live shows around Athens, what pushed Hypostasis into that hiatus, and what changed during that time on a musical and personal level? How awesome is it to finally unleash "Birth OfA Mask" to the fans?
It was never one thing that pushed us into hiatus. Essentially, what happened was that we were interrupted by events in our personal lives, and it took a lot of time for us to be able to devote the time and effort required to bring “Birth Of A Mask” to life. In fact, we had already started recording material twice before, and had to stop both times because of outside factors. Finally releasing “Birth Of A Mask” is a huge relief for all of us. We have been burned by this so many times, it’s exhilarating to finally share it with the world.
“Birth Of A Mask” took years to complete. At what point did you realize this material had grown into a full concept album rather than just a collection of songs?
I was always drawn to concept albums, especially in prog, Dream Theater’s “Metropolis pt.2” and “Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence”, Pain Of Salvation’s “Remedy Lane”, “The Perfect Element” and “Be”, Queensryche’s “Operation: Mindcrime”, these are albums that really shaped my early days. As someone who considers lyrics and their meaning a huge part of the overall experience of music, I usually have a concept in mind when writing;it helps me to frame and focus the music and lyrics, give them direction and meaning.
The whole album is a crazy concept about a broken soul dealing with heavy mental trauma, doubt, and screaming internal voices. Who came up with this twisted story, and how hard was it to translate all that raw emotion into the music? How did you approach translating such heavy ideas into music without losing clarity?
The concept, story, and lyrics are all by me (Romanos Alexander). It’s something that kept evolving and changing up until the last minute, if I had allowed myself more time, I’m sure I would have changed it even more. There are thoughts and moments in the album that are lived experiences, and others that are dramatizations and expansions on the theme and story.
As far as translating it into music, we had a trove of ideas from all the years of our hiatus, so some were adapted to our needs, but a lot was brand new; the concept fed the music, and vice versa. There was a lot of creativity in writing the music, and we had to go back and forth a lot to make sure that it’s not only something that sounds good, but that can also work on an emotional level. Having the concept fleshed out really helped here, we knew what we wanted for a specific part in the story, and we shaped the music to get it.
Your sound blends technical progressive elements with strong melodies and atmosphere. How do you keep that balance without letting one side take over the other?
Honestly, I think the balance is mostly based on our gut feeling. We never liked formulaic writing, so we don’t approach songwriting in a streamlined way (intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-outro etc.). Even the songs which follow a common pattern were not made that way deliberately, but rather because we liked the way that particular structure worked for that particular song. The more technical parts, like the more melodic parts, all fit the greater structure to our ears.
Compared to your 2016 EP, where do you see the biggest evolution in Hypostasis as a band?
I see two different bands altogether. The diversity of emotions and styles is something that we introduced a lot of in “Birth Of A Mask”, and would have to be the biggest step forward in my eyes. Still, the different approach in approaching and executing our musical ideas is also staggering. “Afraid”, as the direct evolution of “Masochist” from our EP, is the clearest example of this: The majority of the composition is the same, but the execution is anything but.
The vocal performance on the album is quite diverse, with both lead and additional voices contributing. How did you decide where to expand vocally and bring in extra singers?
We have a serious issue as composers, very little self-control. As we were writing the songs of “Birth Of A Mask”, we would keep adding ideas and layers, and we soon decided we would like to include more voices to influence the result. Again, the concept played a big part in this; every guest vocalist was selected to fit a particular vocal type: ethereal and kind, earthy and alive, harsh and corrupting, deep and final.
Luckily, we already had the people to fit these parts, and they did great. Everyone was given the freedom to add their own ideas anywhere in the album, and we would consider which would make it into the end result; we were taken completely by surprise by what followed, and some songs were truly transformed by these additions.
Listening to the new songs, I hear huge nods to progressive giants like Pain Of Salvation, Communic, and Symphony X. How do you take those legendary influences and forge them into something that sounds completely like Hypostasis?
Trying to list our influences would be a huge waste of time, they are simply too many to name between the four of us. In the end, I think that the sum of our influences is what makes each of our personal styles unique in its way. We never tried to “sound like X” because we like the sounds of any one artist, and we find it difficult at this point to compare our sound to another band; everything we write sounds more like “us” than anyone else, at least as far as I can hear.
The compositions on “Birth Of A Mask” follow a narrative flow. Did you build the story first and then write the music, or did both develop side by side?
“Birth Of A Mask” was an idea that grew on me from a couple of our earlier-composed songs (“Afraid”, “The Craving”), and at some point we decided to shape the rest of the songs to fit into the structure of this idea. It was certainly a cyclical process however; I can’t say for sure which came first. The concept feeds the ideas as much as new ideas feed into the concept.
The artwork by Panagiotis Soulakis looks totally killer. How does that visual specifically tie into the main character's dark journey and the whole psychological theme of the album?
We were really lucky to work with Panagiotis on this cover. Visual media is not our area of expertise, and we contacted Panagiotis with only a vague sense of a cover idea, and a couple of reference images whose style we liked.
Panagiotis, whose page you should definitely check out, is more at home designing body horror; absolutely not what we were looking for, so nobody really knows how we ended up choosing him for our album cover. But we are glad we did, because he took what little we gave him and spun it in his own style, which then in turn gave us the jump-start we needed. We started enriching his original draft with symbolisms and ideas that it inspired us with, another cycle that resulted into the final cover and back art. There are surface level details, as well as deeper meaning, taken from the album and encoded in the art.
Working as an independent band, what were the biggest challenges during the production, mixing, and mastering process of this album?
Oh, all of it. We had to create almost everything by scratch: the studio, equipment, room treatment, mic placements, demos, the recording process, editing, mixing, production, orchestration, and that’s just for the audio! There was (and still is) an insane amount of work we hadn’t planned for: the art, logo, CD printing, merch design and production, media promotion, music videos, all of this adds up, effort-wise and financially.
But on the other hand, we get to enjoy the benefits of not being managed by a label or otherwise constrained. We got to record at our own pace, in the way we thought best; we wrote our songs in the exact way we meant to; tweaked our sound as much as we saw fit; and have complete control over all our works, copyrights, channels, and our future.
Now that “Birth OfA Mask” is ready to be released what is the ultimate goal for Hypostasis? Are you returning to the live shows, and how do you plan to bring this material to the stage and present its full impact to the audience?
The plan definitely includes live shows. We haven’t played live in way too long, and we have missed the stage greatly. We are currently preparing for our first shows with the new material, which is a big creative driver for us.
The songs of “Birth Of A Mask”, from the simplest part to the most complex passage are, in essence, composed of nothing more than we can play live: two guitars, bass, drums, and vocals. We might use some backing tracks here and there to enhance the soundscape, but we haven’t written ourselves out of being able to do justice to our music.
The local scene in Greece is teeming with great bands and amazing music, and we are looking forward to our return. At the same time, we are eyeing some shows in Europe, but all will come when the time is right.
Add comment
Comments