Doom From the Wine-Dark Sea: Interview with Catapult The Sun
Athens band Catapult The Sun arrive at their first full-length with a record built from copper engravings, biblical quotation, Greek myth, and live feedback. Guitarist and composer Panagiotis explains how all of it belongs in the same room.
Panagiotis is a guitarist and an archaeologist. He spends his professional life inside antiquity, reading the physical evidence of civilisations that had their own ideas about gods, sacrifice, and the sea. When he sits down to write music for Catapult The Sun, the band he formed in Athens in 2019 with members who all came from vocal-led projects, those two lives do not separate.
Martyrdom, the band’s debut full-length, runs thirty-four minutes across six tracks. The cover is Martin Schongauer’s 1480 copper engraving “The Temptation of Saint Anthony,” an image studied, copied, and argued over for five and a half centuries. Albrecht Dürer made his own version of it as a teenager and sold the prints. In Schongauer’s original, a mass of grotesque demons drags the hermit saint through the air and beats him. The band chose it because it holds two things at once that Panagiotis keeps returning to: piousness and brutality, the sacred and the vile, sharing the same frame.
Doomnation Radio: Catapult The Sun has been entirely instrumental since forming in Athens in 2019. When you started out, was the absence of vocals a decision you had to argue for, or was it simply the only form the music could take?
It was absolutely the latter. We consciously took this path, so we could experiment on something different than we did with our previous projects. We all come from bands in which vocals played a key role so this was a challenge for all of us, cause we had to write songs out of the ordinary verse-bridge-chorus pattern. This on the other hand gave us more freedom and led us to composing paths we hadn’t ever tried and which we really enjoy!
DR: The cover of Martyrdom is Schongauer’s “Temptation of Saint Anthony.” Why this image, for this record?
We always liked intense covers, either with people in action (like Dark Sun Festivities) or just powerful photos that speak for themselves (Cathode). This, the cover for Martyrdom, is a very powerful depiction of piousness along with vulgarity and brutality, something that pretty much defines our world, even more today with all that is going on. Moreover, we are prone to appreciate themes about religion, the occult etc.
DR: “The Word Made Flesh” is a direct quotation from the Gospel of John, chapter 1, verse 14, the moment in Christian theology when the divine becomes physical. “A Pale Stine” carries its own obvious weight. Where do the titles come from, and does the music follow the title, or does the title arrive after?
Very glad you ask! Yeah you are of course right about “The Word Made Flesh,” it is a quotation from the gospel of John, and although I am not a religious person myself I am attracted by the science of theology, so I study a lot of this stuff.
“A Pale Stine” is a simple little game of words. It is also the first song I wrote for this album. For both songs, music came first, but it is not always the case. Other times we think about some really nice song titles which we attribute to riffs that are written later. That is the case with “Powerful Dark Objects (Mind Bender)” and “Insanity Has Thin Walls.”
DR: “Black Sails On Wine-Dark Seas” closes the album. The phrase “wine-dark sea” belongs to Homer, appearing in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. For a band from Athens, reaching back to that language feels charged. Is it?
Yeah it is. Considering also that I am an archaeologist by trade, and I have been into this stuff all my life, I have a personal opinion on most things antiquity related. But “wine-dark sea” is so poetic, that man I had to use it. It also bound with the tragic fate of so many heroes going to war or trying to return home after. Black sails intensifies this phrase even further cause it brings another dark myth in mind, that of Theseus, who, returning from Crete, forgot to take the black sails on his ship down, a tragic action that led to his father’s death.
That father was Aegeus, king of Athens, who stood on the cliffs of Cape Sounion watching the horizon. He had told Theseus to sail back with white sails if he survived killing the Minotaur. The black sails came into view and Aegeus threw himself from the cliff into the sea. The water became the Aegean, named for a king who died because his son forgot. Panagiotis, who works with the physical remains of these stories for a living, chose to close a doom record with that image.
DR: Every release has been recorded live at Made In Hell Studio in Moschato and mixed by Nick Papakostas at Clepsydra Studio in Glyfada. What does that approach give you?
We like to bring the live feeling on record, and we also use a lot of feedback and interaction with our amps, and this is transferred only with a live recording. Afterwards we add some rhythm overdubs and some leads. But other times lead parts are also recorded live with the help of looper pedals which help me a lot in layering these lead melodies. I would say this layering is a key part in CTS’s music.
We have known Nick for 25 years, he is a great musician himself and a great sound engineer. Made in Hell Studios is where we rehearse, and we like the environment a lot. So, for us, it is like we are recording a rehearsal and we feel comfortable recording there. Shout out also to Panagiotis Misdeal, the owner of Clepsydra Studios whose help is valuable.
DR: The album runs to just over thirty-four minutes across six tracks. Was the running time a deliberate decision, or did the material simply end where it ended?
Someone told me that Dark Sun Festivities is longer so how come Martyrdom is called full length. This is true. But the running time is never a deliberate decision, actually we checked what the running time was after the production was done. All our songs end when it feels right.
DR: After six years of EPs, Martyrdom is your first full-length. What changed, in the band, in the music, or in how you think about what Catapult The Sun is?
Nothing changed dramatically, we just felt that this could be our first full length, because we believe that our music was more mature plus more experimental for sure. It could have been another EP though, how we call it is not so important to us, to be honest.
I, personally, and on behalf of the rest of the band would like to thank you a lot for giving us the opportunity to talk about our band and our music. Thank you also for these beautiful questions! We appreciate your support! Doom on!
Six years of EPs, one full-length, and a compass that points consistently toward the places where religion, myth, and history press up against the present. Schongauer’s demons, the Gospel of John, the wine-dark sea, the black sails of Theseus. Panagiotis carries all of it into the room at Made In Hell Studio and plays it live, feedback and all, until the songs end where they end…
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