“If you put Kate Bush, Auf Der Maur, Ayreon, Chiasmata, Igorrr, old White Zombie and Amogh Symphony in a blender with several metronomes running different time signatures, add a healthy dash of thrash riffs to the proggy mix and baked the resulting mixture for several hours you probably wouldn’t even come close to the sound.” – Lee Davidson – Prog Metal Madness
Behind the Scenes: Red Lion – “Metallia” [Prog Metal]
by on August 29, 2018 in Metallia Progressive Metal
‘Metallia’ is what it is, not music for fragile souls but an evanescent storm of instrumental music (the voice being used not for words, but as sound) that will suit the enthusiast of powerful, progressive and experimental music.” – Rinco Ennema ~ Rock Affairs
“Do you get bored quickly by the standard prog metal music offer? that will not happen to you with ‘Metallia’! – Herman Beunk – Xymphonia
Metallia has already drawn the attention of progressive circles, but they have yet to analyze the enigmatic, versatile, bold, suspiciously attractive style of its music. This is one of those circumstances where you think you have heard something similar before, but you can not parallel it with something recognizable. Her material sounds “metallized”, adventurous, and has a cinematic affinity. Above all, however, the sound is disruptive, the vocal injections arouse this impact. Clearly interesting, in a sense, it could be co-production of Shrapnel and 4AD. Check it out. ~ George Politopoulos – Flight of Pegasus
RELEASE DATE: July 27, 2018
Metallia
I. Red Lion (4:30)
II. Bee (5:08)
III. Androgyny (3:21)
IV. Resurrection (3:56)
V. Dragon’s Kiss (5:03)
VI. Triumph (3:24)
Instruments: Oh.
ELECTRIC GUITARS, ACOUSTIC GUITARS, VOCALS, DRUMS, VIOLIN, KEYBOARDS, BASS
Composer: Oh.
Mixing & Mastering: Oh.
Recording Location: Greece
Available on Bandcamp
Description
“Metallia” is an epical prog-metal composition in six parts. A multi-layered sonic piece of ravishing solo electric guitars, time-bending tempo shifts, grooving bass lines and deranged drums.
This instrumental progressive metal album will reveal its intricacies and hidden depths over time. It will extract from your mind pure visions, to mend your mental pictures, preen presumptions and to elicit an element of the unexpected…. because that is what will transmute your subliminal mind map into a remarkable blueprint which will lead you from wherever you are now, to wherever you want to be.
I. Red Lion
The sonic journey begins with the fiery “Red Lion”. Dazzling, dynamic prog-metal guitar solos amidst the haunting ancient rhythm of a bewitching toumperleki, groovy bass lines and eerie portentous vocals set the musical sojourner on his quest from the Prima materia to the creation of the Magnum Opus.
II. Bee
An acoustic flamingo based guitar introduces an abstruse beat forged from multi-layered vocals which lead to frenetic harmonic guitar solos shifting in time-twisting riffs collecting the delirium of the mind-matter and as a “Bee” transforming it to spiritual gold.
III. Androgyny
An ominous ethereal chorus introduces the stage of “Androgyny” – one’s conquest over duality. An ironic, menacing and taunting riff incites the seeker, as a celestial chorus awakens the hero on his journey. The blossoming of a self-expressive electric guitar meets the forces of inertia, apathy and the oblivion of nothingness. The unsteady hero though rises from the emptiness with a twisted, spiralling enraptured guitar solo as the celestial beings rejoice.
IV. Resurrection
Undulating beats and transparent steely violins proclaim the entrance into mastery in “Resurrection”. A rock guitar reels in ecstatic head-banging measures leading to an explosive, exuberant climax of tempo-shifting multi-instrumental solos.
V. Dragon’s Kiss
Kissed by the Dragon but not dissolved by it. “Dragon’s Kiss” is an epic propulsive build of percussion, guttural and lilting vocals, riffing electric guitars, fantastical violins, grooving bass lines and furious drums traversing dark sonic landscapes and imagery.
VI. Triumph
Delirious high pitched screaming vocals celebrate the “Triumph”. Finger-twisting guitar riffs soar in multi-layered sonic solos while a distorted demoniac guitar propels a spellbinding bass and drums to the ultimate state of immutability.
Commentary
We all want to have answers to the ultimate meaning of why we are here. There’s a time when you need to set aside everything you already know.
We collect experiences and impressions with our minds and this increases the presence of our soul.
There is a duality not only without but within because the mind receives information from both the body and the spirit.
If the connection is weak between the spirit and the mind – there is no possibility to see the whole or our state and place in existence.
Our minds – our everyday consciousness is cluttered with judgements, repetition, echoes of apprehension and fear, debates and doubts. If left on its own without the guidance of spirit; we exist in a negative world, alienated, in conflict with reality.
Let’s isolate the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that are produced by the physical body first. Then we can isolate the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that are given by our spirits and be restored to our primal state of awareness.
Here is where Metallia comes in…
Metallia is purely for your mind. It attacks your judgements and expectations. It is an alchemical journey transmuting the base metal of your mind to gold.
This instrumental progressive metal concept album is a six-part journey to extract from your mind pure visions, to mend your mental pictures, preen presumptions and to elicit an element of the unexpected…. because that is what will transmute your subliminal mind map into a remarkable blueprint which will lead you from wherever you are now, to wherever you want to be.
Listen
Reviews
Here’s what some early reviewers say about ‘Metallia’:
“If you put Kate Bush, Auf Der Maur, Ayreon, Chiasmata, Igorrr, old White Zombie and Amogh Symphony in a blender with several metronomes running different time signatures, add a healthy dash of thrash riffs to the proggy mix and baked the resulting mixture for several hours you probably wouldn’t even come close to the sound.”~ Lee Davidson – Prog Metal Madness
“This is not a garrulous display of technique. There is inspiration, delineations, intense vision, to the point of fever pitch chaos, which will delight the “metal” senses and is altogether a monumental showcase. The girl seems to have more riff in her, than half the Greek heavy metal scene of the past 10 years. ” ~ “Pan Pap” – Rocktime.gr
It’s still a mystery to me, how a young lady like Olivia can invent, perform, and produce such a gorgeous piece of musical art. I suppose she got somehow a blessing from the forgotten gods of Olympus… No, really. It’s a wonderfully creative and inventive EP which sounds much more substantial and thought-provoking than many recordings from well-known grandees of modern instrumental Prog-Metal. ~ Igor Gorely – R.A.I.G. Records (Progarchives)
‘Metallia’ is what it is, not music for fragile souls but an evanescent storm of instrumental music (the voice being used not for words, but as sound) that will suit the enthusiast of powerful, progressive and experimental music.” ~ Rinco Ennema ~ Rock Affairs
“Do you get bored quickly by the standard prog metal music offer? that will not happen to you with ‘Metallia’! ~ Herman Beunk – Xymphonia
“Oh wow! What the bloody hell’s going on here then? Freshness. Uniqueness. Boldness. An outlier! Call it what you like, but this is anything but your typical run of the mill, bog standard, meat and potatoes, vanilla-like metal.” ~ K-MaNriffs – Blessed Altar Zine
“Chaos becomes order, the mind blowing ‘Metallia’ by Oh. ~ Martin Hutchinson – Progradar
An interesting well thought out project from a talented-mult-instrumentalist ~ Geoff Penn – Progplanet
“Cacophonous, complex, illustrative, dense, awash in radiance, terrifying, challenging- all of it driven by the taut, ferocious guitar work and instrumental mastery demonstrated by Ms. H. Waves of feminine choral sounds weave in and out of the tapestry, washes of intensity rarely relenting, leading me to recall why at one point in my younger days I was strongly drawn to consider using psychedelic drugs. Mind expansion, spirit expansion. Transcendence. Enlightenment. ~ Stephen Conrad – Progressive Rock Fanatics–Progarchives
After some interrogations the EP grows on you, which gives us music in a little different vintage, so for the curious, just release the handbrake and discover! ~ Conny Myrberg – Artrock.se
Metallia has already drawn the attention of progressive circles, but they have yet to analyze the enigmatic, versatile, bold, suspiciously attractive style of its music.This is one of those circumstances where you think you have heard something similar before, but you can not parallel it with something recognizable. Her material sounds “metallized”, adventurous, and has a cinematic affinity. Above all, however, the sound is disruptive, the vocal injections arouse this impact. Clearly interesting, in a sense, it could be co-production of Shrapnel and 4AD. Check it out. ~ George Politopoulos – Flight of Pegasus
Listening to Metallia, expect to be unexpected. Nothing is obvious here, nothing sounds as you would expect, and surprise is surprising. ~ Artur Chachlowski – MLWZ
Neither guitar hero nor singer metal, OH. invents a progressive rock art metal where Olivia’s guitar is queen, sometimes supplanted by her war cries sung like a second guitar. An extraordinary musical experience, extreme for canterbury fans, so to discover absolutely. ~ Jean-Christophe – Neoprog
What Oh. screams out of her guitar is not for the faint-hearted, by the constant stream of trash riffs this is a dirty Steve Vai or a vicious Joe Satriani but with balls or better said without balls or at least as well. It is unsettling in the metal scene when a longhaired guitarist turns out to be a woman in the end…Her voice meanders from mood to emotion. From fear to love. The songs do not have a standard structure but are textures like the wandering Etesian winds that so often thrash the Aegean Sea. ~Jos Driessen – Progwereld
An excellent example of how instrumental guitar albums can still sound inspired and interesting. – Jupiter Variation
“In 2008 Jannick Top sent a shock wave through progressive rock community with the release of “Infernal Machina”. The sound that he created on that album was absolutely unique, a fascinating collision of zeuhl, metal and primal screams. Now after ten years I found the same formula rediscovered and applied, again with astonishing result, by OH. (Olivia Hadjiioannou) in her new album Metallia.” ~ Tomasz Grzywalski – Secret Exhibition
“The hidden leitmotives and recurring patterns in the compostion reveal themselves only after multiple listens and make this EP a real grower that you will return to over and over again and still be surprised and impressed every time you hear it. With Metallia, Olivia Hadjiioannou has proven to be an incredibly gifted and creative composer and technically talented musician. If you are tired of progressive bands repeating the same old stuff over and over again, look no further – Oh. has you covered.” ~ Matt S. – Metal Soliloquy
“Only after a few passages does the open music lover begin to discover that the pieces are multi-layered and rich in detail and that the electric guitar is only used as one means of expression among many. Besides the parts for the guitars and drums, one discovers the ethnically coloured percussion, the creative rhythms and breaks and the polyphonic, mostly very wild vocals as well as the more extreme and unusual sounds that one can elicit from the human vocal cords. ~ Siggy Zielinski – Babyblauen Seiten
“With top notes of Dream Theater and the intensity of Liquid Tension Experiment, Olivia takes the listener on a dark yet vivid journey that intersects the mind of Edgar Allen Poe and the imagination of Stephen Gammell” ~ Vinny Iacocca – The Closet Concert Arena
“Stunning, raw and uncompromising” ~ Sébastien Bonnays – Prog Female Voices
“Time to tell you about this stratospheric lady who comes from nowhere or from another planet, that of metal-prog-fusion-trash-dream-haunting and not only!” ~ Alain Massard – Profil Prog
“The most important adjective is “powerful”. Everything oozes power. The compositions, the sound effects, the arrangements, the use of dynamics in mixing; everything has received a large dose of attention, creating an epic sound. These elements make a grandiose mix, where nothing stays the same, except the powerful impression that it all leaves.” ~ Jerry Van Kooten – Dutch Progressive Rock Page DPRP
Olivia Hadjiioannou is always up for a surprise… After the quite heavy “Synemotion” album, she released a couple of distinctly art rock oriented singles. However, her latest EP is quite different from everything we have heard of her before: It’s a tour de force into high-grade prog metal realms with shredding guitars, sinister vocal layers, and unexpectedly transforming rhythm patterns. All music composed by Oh. All instruments played by Oh. An overwhelming one-woman show! Favorite track: Androgyny. ~ Sven B. Schreiber – Bandcamp
This girl isn’t afraid to sound unique with this gorgeous, mind expanding instrumental feast of experimental prog metal gifted with shredding riffs, eastern vibes, ethereal interludes and dramatic shifts in pace and complexity. There’s no empty virtuosity here though, since everything flows together into one sonic experience that never ceases to sound warm, emotional and organic. An ambitious and compelling endeavour. Favorite track: Androgyny. ~ Sauro Fabi – Bandcamp
“The whole thing is realized through multi-layered vocals, frenetic but harmonious guitar solos, ecstatic pounding riffs, imaginative violins, rhythmic basses and wild drums. It should Metallia hijack the listener in a wondrous acoustic landscape, which should make him forget everything around him.” ~ Joan Degener – Betreutes Proggen
A symphonic approach for “Dragon’s Kiss”, in truth a melodic melting pot to better blur the tracks, Olivia wanders according to her inspirations and goes from a nostalgic rock to a screaming and fusion metal, revealing an amazing skillfulness. The last “Triumph” track, which is a real slaughter, exudes a great freshness of inspiration and shows, if necessary, the imperial mastery of the lady.Impregnated with a heavy atmosphere, an eclectic and electric music with a fast tempo, this “Métallia” is a very beautiful album where the lovers of Olivia Hadjiioannou and the others will find what they are looking for! ~ Gabriel Badelier – Progcritique
“Time signatures change, bombastic elements come in and out, and it really feels like the listener is being swept along in a maelstrom, or being put inside a washing machine when it is at full pelt.” ~ Kev Rowland – Firebrand radio – Framemusic
“Truly mindblowing. And speaking of mindblowing, here we have a musician that seems to excel at everything she does. Fluent in drumming, bass, guitars, piano and violin!” ~ Peter Cox – Your Music Blog
“She has developed a musical style of her own, which can best be placed in the utmost corner of extreme prog metal” ~ Henric van Essen – Dutch Metal Maniac
“Olivia Hadjiioannou shows us the female side of progressive metal, muscular and aggressive like that of her male colleagues, but the Greek musician is also attracted by the contrasts between primordial chaos and latent tension that this can produce….The music does not stop at progressive metal with a symphonic touch but inside there emerge inflections that point towards Middle Eastern, operatic and Hellenic stylistic elements, all fundamentals that contribute to increase the melodramatic depth of the work. It must not have been easy to design the complex stratifications that make up the pieces in solitude.” ~ Lorenzo Barbagli – Open Magazine
“Olivia begins the Great Work by pouring the devastating fury of the Erinyes into inhuman vocalizations that fully invest the listener, annihilating him definitively with Sabbathian riffs and a killer groove. The sound is repeatedly fractured by acid lashed metal and by a percussive tribalism that the traditional toumperleki dominates, underlining its oriental features.” ~ Antonio Menichella – Hamelin Prog
Description
Many believe our journey through life is a series of events. Each event leading to a totally new experience . There is a misconception that our progress is linear but in fact it is more a spiral. Events repeat themselves. We move back and forth over repeating archetypal events with various variations, until “we get it”. That’s why history repeats itself, why we find ourselves over and over again in the same types of relationships and situations. We watch the same plots repeat in the movies we watch, the books we read, the songs we sing and the experiences we share with our friends and family in our lives. We never tire of being entertained by these themes, because we ourselves are also repeating them.
“As Above, So Below” is a phrase attributed to Greek writer-god Hermes Trismegistus, “thrice-greatest Hermes” – three times great because he knew the three parts of the wisdom of the whole universe, the three parts were alchemy, astrology, and theurgy – which is to invoke the presence of gods or divine spirits through rituals such as music to achieve henosis (uniting with the divine) and perfecting oneself, become united with our higher counterparts and attaining Divine Consciousness.
The phrase means what happens on one level of reality also happens on the other. The macrocosm and the microcosm reflect each other. In Christianity it means “As it is in heaven, so it shall be on earth.”
It means everything is sacred and sympathetic. But, there is a misconception that on our present spiritual journey, we begin as mere material mortals and then finally are resurrected to an all-knowing spiritual being in some final boring blissful state of being. Some goal to be achieved and that’s it. The same misconception exists in our lives. We believe if we achieve some random goal, that we will reach an end of our journey and then we can rest. We are driven through our lives unconsciously to achieve something. It is misunderstanding caused by an unexamined life.
The album, Metallia explore this and reveals an overlooked detail, a missing step. There are six songs, Red Lion (prima materia), Bee (nigredo), Androgyny (albedo), Resurrection (rubedo) , Dragon’s Kiss (citrinitas) and Triumph (Lapis Philosophorum), that relate to some of the processes in alchemy which is part of the wisdom of the universe. Metallia focuses on alchemy but not in the sense of changing physical lead into physical gold but as an investigation into what is our true spiritual constitution through experiencing the mysteries of birth, mind, duality, death and resurrection.
We didn’t come to Earth to be resurrected into a spiritual consciousness in order to leave this level of existence, but rather we came to earth to have experience here while we are realized. That is when the true journey begins here on Earth. Metallia makes the point that we can’t even begin our journey until we “recover” our initial self – the one we were born with, before it was “darkened” on this Earth plane. The music in each song is purposefully composed to take you on this journey – to remind you of your true origin (Red Lion), throw off the noise in your mind (Bee), find balance in duality (Androgyny), become what you have always been (Resurrection), given wings from the jewels of the unconscious (Dragon’s Kiss) and finally finding that seemingly immaterial substance that pervades all life (Triumph).
Read more about each song by clicking the images below
