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.”
“We did five songs in the set,” she adds, “one of them the Blood Stain Child song ‘Stargazer’ because it’s a fan favourite, and lyrically it’s a song that represents me as a whole. The lyrics are very personal, which is why I chose to play it.”
“If I could stay awake around the clock I would, and if people come to me for advice about this sort of thing I tell them that if you have a project you need to work on it yourself, because nobody is going to do it better than you. It’s your child, you gave birth to it, so nobody is going to hurt more than you if it fails.”

During our June 2014 interview, Sophia described Season Of Ghosts’ music as “a strange mix of everything from classical to epic movie soundtrack to metal, gothic, industrial, Visual Kei and my general weirdness.” She wasn’t kidding. While there are some strong threads linked to Blood Stain Child – including occasional growling vocals provided by the lady herself (!) – the album goes well beyond straightforward metal and into the realms of both symphonic and trance music.

“People have told me they were expecting something completely different. Maybe they were carried away by the fact I wear Visual Kei or gothic, so they were expecting gothic music. In fact, because I’m a huge enthusiast of electro-gothic industrial EBM, that stuff is on The Human Paradox.”

Go to this location for the complete interview.

Season of Ghosts is a groundbreaking music project, dedicated to the love for the unseen and film soundtracks, combining extreme rock and metal sounds, harsh electronics and powerful, compelling vocals, through the eerie spectrum of a Sci-Fi and horror movie.

Tracklisting:

"Nothing Disappears Without A Trace"
"Genesis - The Phoenix Syndrome"
"Time Travellers"
"Dream; Paralysis"
"The Human Paradox"
"[NE]: MESIS - The Kiss Of Justice"
"Beautiful Eternal Things"
"Dreaming In The Gray Lands"
"The Road To Acheron"
"Quantum - Through The Looking Glass"
"Reincarnation"
"There And Back Again"

Preview: