Zombie Sam

SEASON OF GHOSTS – Blood Stains And Zombie Brains: Chapter 2

By Carl Begai

In 2018, electro-oriented metal band Season Of Ghosts made the decision to relocate from vocalist / founder Sophia Aslanides’ native Greece to the UK in the interest of the band’s future. With their second album, A Leap Of Faith, making the rounds it made more sense to Sophia and partner-in-crime / guitarist Zombie Sam – a solo artist and producer in his own right – to be located in the UK as it’s a central hub in relation to Europe and the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the birth of a nasty bug dubbed COVID-19 knocked the world on its ass with a global pandemic, effectively putting their plans for 2020 on hold. At least in terms of Season Of Ghosts getting back on the road in support of A Leap Of Faith.

“As far as opportunities are concerned there are plenty of them, lots of people to meet and network,” Sophia says of the decision to relocate, “but on a different level, if you want to work or evolve as a person in any way imaginable you can do it in England. It’s very fertile ground. Sure, the pandemic came along but it hasn’t swayed my thinking because I’m pretty much an introvert and a nerd (laughs). I work from home anyway, and I never stop working for the band. Because we couldn’t tour this year, we started working on the Season Of Ghosts infrastructure. Sam started working on new songs and new ideas, we’ve both contributed on different levels, and we’ve also been studying to improve on and gain more skills both related to music and our day jobs. It’s safe to say that we’ve worked more during the pandemic than before (laughs). We’ve just tried to use the time as creatively as possible.”

ZOMBIE SAM – A Little Madness Among Friends

By Carl Begai

In 2013, Italian soundtrack composer/orchestra conductor and producer Zombie Sam unleashed his debut album Self Conscious Insanity, a record that blended symphonic and industrial elements to create a unique calling card. The outing yielded two official videos – “A Hallowed Tale” and “Woman In White” – that gave Zombie Sam a Tim Burton-esue identity to go along with the music and earned him a cult following. A lot has changed since then including his musical vision, meaning the fans clamouring for a sequel to Self Conscious Insanity should be prepared for a distinctive new take on an esablished theme.

“I don’t try to imitate anybody, I just try to compose what I feel,” Sam says. “A few years ago I had some health problems with my heart, and after that my life changed somehow and I started seeing things in a different way. It also affected the way I compose music, so that definitely had an influence on the songs for the new album. I also wanted to change my sound. People told me the first album was leaning more in an industrial direction like Rob Zombie or Marilyn Manson, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to create something unique, be more myself; not too serious, maybe even a bit funny.”

More rock than metal this time out, Zombie Sam’s new material is, ironically, reminiscent of two beloved Canadian bands: The Creepshow and Billy Talent. He agrees with the suggestion that if his music is going to wear a stamp it should read “Horror Rock”.

“You mentioned those bands to me and I thought ‘Holy crap, he’s right…’ The new Zombie Sam music doesn’t sound like those bands exactly but it is similar. I like the music from both Billy Talent and The Creepshow, I like the way they perform live, so I could learn somethings from artists like that. They have an amazing energy. My new music is going more in the direction of something like The Creepshow. I don’t want to be heavy metal and I think this new stuff is more rock. Some of the vocal lines even sound a bit like pop music even though it’s not. It’s definitely more horror rock.” Continue reading ZOMBIE SAM – A Little Madness Among Friends

SEASON OF GHOSTS – “Maybe I’m All That You Fear”

By Carl Begai

Season Of Ghosts vocalist Sophia Aslanidou has left her Blood Stain Child past behind, although it’s probably more accurate to say she’s buried it in the dust kicked up as she’s moved forward. Months before the December 2014 release date of the debut album, The Human Paradox, Sophia made certain to keep word-of-mouth-and-social-media promotion ramped up, and it paid off better than she or anyone else expected. Pre-orders and a significant buzz on metal websites added up, but having Season Of Ghosts booked to play the popular annual Metal Female Voices Festival in Belgium saw the band perform for close to 2,000 people for their morning set. This in spite of being at the bottom of the roster and not having an album out. It was an experience that cemented Sophia’s strength as a do-it-yourself artist, and her commitment to making Season Of Ghosts much more than just a studio project.

“One reporter at the festival put it best; she said you had to be living under a rock not to know that Season Of Ghosts was playing,” Sophia laughs. “It was surreal. We had to wake up at 7:00am and I’m not a morning person. I was tempted to have a couple beers before the show but it was too early in the morning even for me (laughs). I went out on stage and saw something like 1,000 people, and when we started playing people started coming into the venue from the market thing they had set up outside. We had a large audience watching us and cheering us on, and I was wondering what the fuck was wrong with those people (laughs). I mean that in the best way because I couldn’t be up that early for my favourite band, and we weren’t even the first band that day. The response was very heartwarming and very surprising. We brought as much merchandise as we could and it sold out very quickly, almost everything we had. I was very impressed.” Continue reading SEASON OF GHOSTS – “Maybe I’m All That You Fear”

SEASON OF GHOSTS – The Human Paradox: “Keeps You Wondering What’s Lurking Around Each Corner…”

By Carl Begai

Former Blood Stain Child vocalist Sophia Aslanidou broke away from the band after only one album and sporadic touring due to personal and creative differences. An unfortunate situation, but rather than crawling into a corner to die a scorned artist’s death she picked herself up and invested all her time, energy and remaining sanity in a full-on solo project, Season Of Ghosts. The Human Paradox is in fact a collaboration between Sophia, Italian horror metal genius/composer Zombie Sam, and multi-instrumentalist NeroArgento, resulting in off-kilter album boasting equal parts metal and orchestral soundtrack (with occasional death metal growls scattered hither and yon) that never quite goes where you expect. It’s for this reason that when things slow down or become uncomfortably weird you can’t actually bring yourself to skip to the next track. A well crafted sonic adventure with a remarkable payload of earworm vocal melodies, The Human Paradox keeps you wondering what’s lurking around each corner as you weave your way through it.

Blood Stain Child fans may be pleased to know the trance elements that accompanied Sophia’s entrance for the Epsilon album, only this time out her voice isn’t auto-tuned to death. She’s able to explore her (surprising) full range, doing so right out of the box with ‘Genesis’ and ‘Time Travellers’, two of the heaviest tracks on the record. Hearing her low range on ‘Dream: Paralysis’ and ‘The Human Paradox’ is a welcome touch, the title track played out with the strength of any X Japan ballad right down to some spoken word (Sophia is welcome to read me the phone book anytime). Continue reading SEASON OF GHOSTS – The Human Paradox: “Keeps You Wondering What’s Lurking Around Each Corner…”

SEASON OF GHOSTS – Blood Stains And Zombie Brains

By Carl Begai

When asked about her short tenure with Japanese melodic death/trance metal outifit Blood Stain Child – two years and one album in total – Greek vocalist Sophia looks back on it as a bittersweet experience. The split was anything but amicable, with Sophia harbouring a certain amount of resentment with regards to how and why things fell apart. Rather than letting the bad taste left in her mouth poison her love for making music, Sophia did what any genuine artist does: she buckled down to create something bigger and better than her previous outing. Season Of Ghosts is her new lease on life, a labour of love that pushed Sophia’s creativity to an entirely new level for the debut album planned for later this year, The Human Paradox.

“It’s a pretty crazy mixture of everything and anything I represent and believe in,” says Sophia without missing a beat. “And my co-producer Zombie Sam was a great helping hand during the whole process because he has the classical knowledge to interpret my ideas exactly. I have classical knowledge of my own but I’m not very good with software yet and that’s what it came down to. I can program the basics, but going from what I know about programming to what I wanted to do for Season Of Ghosts, there was a huge gap. I gave Sam my piano scripts, music scores and an overwhelming bulk of notes, and I told him to use this piano sound, that instrument or the other to make it sound Frankenstein because that represents me (laughs). He tried it once, twice, and I was getting frustrated by about the 10th time, but once he got it right we worked from that point forward like a clock.”

Sophia is known first and foremost as a singer, but it’s important to establish the fact that she built the musical foundation for Season Of Ghosts herself. She didn’t hire a group of songwriters to create material according to a wishlist; the tracks started out as personal compositions that grew into full-blown songs over time.

“For this album I started with piano and guitar, and I just let myself go so that I was free to imagine what a certain song should sound like. I’d say 90% of the songs on the album started with the piano or guitar melody, and only 10% – really just one song – started with the vocal melody. I built the foundation and then I imagined the vocal parts.” Continue reading SEASON OF GHOSTS – Blood Stains And Zombie Brains