Interview with: Kimon Zeliotis from ESCALATION

Thank you very much. In 2005 our singer Takis asked me to help him record a couple of songs he had written for himself. I agreed and we worked together on his first song called Breaking. Through this experience we realized that we enjoyed working together and there was mutual respect for each others abilities so we decided we should form a band.

There's actually no special reason we chose this band name. We both just liked the word escalation as a band name. Also, escalation is the phenomenon of something getting more intense step by step which is something that we often incorporate in our songs so I suppose it could be used to describe our music in certain cases.

While the first two songs we recorded were Breaking and Transparent Walls, the self titled track was the first song we recorded that represented more accurately the path we wanted to take as a band musically that's why we named the demo after it.

We're a very new band with only 5 songs under our belt so our sound is still in the process of being defined. Our intentions are to combine melodic vocals, the aggressiveness of modern Heavy Metal and Progressive Metal elements. Synths and orchestral strings also play a big part in our music.

Some of our major influences are NEVERMORE, DREAM THEATER, METALLICA, ICED EARTH, MESHUGGAH, SYMPHONY X, PAIN OF SALVATION, QUEENSRYCHE, IRON MAIDEN, PINK FLOYD etc. I also listen to a lot of movie soundtracks which I also consider a major influence in our sound. We don't have plans to record a cover in the near future but we are definitely going to prepare some covers for our live performances.

Of course, we prefer to have a full line up. We are currently searching of musicians to join our band.

No, we only printed a limited amount of copies for promotion to webzines and magazines. However, we have all our songs available for people to listen to in our Myspace and Facebook websites.

Now that we completed the demo our priority is to find musicians to complete the line up. Then we plan to replace the programmed stuff in our demo (bass and drums) with real performances and start sending copies to record labels as a full band. Meanwhile we do have some ideas for new songs which we are going to work on to be ready, hopefully, for a full-length album when the time comes.

We still can't really claim that we have a personal sound, however we believe that the way we balance the heavy and aggressive sound of 7string guitars with the atmosphere of the strings and the melodic vocals of our singer is not that common in today's bands.

To be honest I don't really follow the Greek Metal scene. From what little I've heard I can't say that I'm impressed. What I find really disappointing is the amount of bands that choose to have growling/screaming vocals instead of a proper singer.

Aside from the bands I mentioned before I don't have anywhere special to draw my influence from. I just play the guitar and often an interesting idea comes up and based on that and by adding other little ideas on it a song takes form. Our lyrics in this demo deal mostly with inner struggle and loss. Breaking and The Shine have to do with the loss of a loved one, Transparent Walls is about a person's regrets about his life, Instrument Of Cure is based on the book The Lathe Of Heaven and Last Sunrise is based on the book Interview With A Vampire.

Thank you for having us in your site! We really hope people reading this interview will listen and enjoy our music and feel free to send us any comments. Also, if anyone who plays guitar, bass or drums thinks he's got what it takes to be a member of

ESCALATION can contact us at escalationgr@gmail.com.