Whatever label you want to file this band under, ever since their formation during the turn of the millennium, Pantheist has kept Doom Metal aficionados spellbound. In that quarter-century of darkness, the band surrounding founder and vocalist/keyboardist Kostas Panagiotou released six albums and a handful of other smaller releases, and Pantheist anno 2023 seems to be increasingly becoming the band Panagiotou had envisioned ever since its inception. This year, Pantheist put on some impressive shows and as we speak are putting the finishing touches to a new EP, enough reason to ask this always enthusiastic, articulate and friendly musician for an update…
Hi Kostas and welcome to our pages. Pantheist has always been a dear band to me. From the beginning when I got into the Funeral Doom genre, sometime during the early/mid 00s, Pantheist was one of the bands that kept intriguing me. As the band slowly (how else?) creeps towards its 25th anniversary, how do you look back on that quarter century of Pantheist?
Hey Felix it’s a pleasure to be talking again after all this time. I guess our relationship over the years reflects a little bit the history of the band. While we have had a continuous presence over these 25 years, we were always on/off in terms of how active we are. Some brilliant periods full of interesting activity were followed by barren years where not much has been happening for various reasons. We also had a fair bit of line-up changes, and the band itself has moved twice, first from Belgium to England and then from England to Wales. This meant every time a fresh start, and I’m not even counting the weird period in which we experienced the world pandemic. But the important thing is that we are now back on track with some much needed stability, and it seems for good. In summary, I guess you could say it has been a very interesting journey with its ups and downs, but we are hungrier than ever for more!
Apart from maybe the band’s earliest works, Pantheist have always found itself at the outskirts of the borders of the Funeral Doom genre. Not nearly as heavy and crushing as bands like Evoken or Worship, but instead it increasingly found its emotional and musical depth in a more progressive sound. These days you also seem to have dropped the Funeral Doom-label yourself and consider yourself an “atmospheric doom band”. In your view, how exactly did this creep into the now characteristic Pantheist sound?
When we were introduced to the scene back in 2002/2003, it was an exciting time for the ‘funeral doom genre’. It felt like there were only a handful of bands that were playing this style of music, and most of them were quite isolated and unique. This whole mystique intrigued me.
Then some of these bands started to play international gigs for the first time, others started playing any gigs altogether after a long hiatus and I dare say we played a role in all of this; we organized the first ‘funeral doom’ tour in Europe in 2003 featuring Skepticism, Pantheist and Until Death Overtakes Me. I personally organized the first two Esoteric gigs after a six-year hiatus in 2003/2004 when I moved to London and after that they got the ball rolling for good.
So naturally, I wanted to be part of this whole ‘buzz’ and Pantheist was effortlessly taken in by the scene, even though I always felt we were a bit different, perhaps more melodic and ‘song based’ than the bands considered to be the pillars of the genre. In fact, we used to describe our music as ‘funereal doom’ in the early days to differentiate ourselves from the genre! My idea was that we play ‘doom metal with funereal elements’ rather than funeral doom.
As the years passed, I realized that my idea of ‘funeral doom’ is different from that of others. I used to consider the genre definition as ‘doom metal music with a funereal atmosphere’, a bit like the description I gave earlier of our early sound. But over time, I realized that apparently, in order to qualify as FD, you need to have a ‘minimalist’ and ‘bleak’ sound with nihilistic or at least abstract themes, far removed from everyday reality. I would hear terms such as the one you used earlier, ‘crushing’ and I was thinking to myself, well I have no idea of how to ‘crush’ a listener! I just want them to feel deep emotions after listening to my music. I want to create music that resonates long after you stop listening to it.
This was a definition I couldn’t get behind as this is not how I feel about the music I make. So I started using all sorts of different terms, involving words such as ‘atmospheric, symphonic, orchestral, melodic, emotional, cinematic’ or even ‘gothic’ to describe our music.
The attentive listener will consider what we discussed above a natural evolution in Pantheist’s DNA, because although the music sounds much more progressive today, the organs and grunts of the debut album are still present, after all. People who first heard Pantheist with your last album, ‘Closer To God’, might characterize the band quite differently. How do you see and feel this yourself? Do you still feel connected to the Funeral Doom genre as a musical phenomenon?
To be honest, I don’t think we have changed all that much over the years. I’m still the main vocalist, and it’s still a characteristic vocal performance, as I wouldn’t know how to do things differently. Keyboard arrangements are still central to our sound, because most tracks are based around them as I’m the main composer in the band. We are still a ‘metal’ band in any sense of the word, and we still play slow music, at least slower than average (I can attest to that every time a new band member, unfamiliar with the genre, tries to play our music and inevitable starts speeding as the slow tempos feel unnatural).
Sure, some of our albums have been softer and more melodic. Others are more ‘brutal’ or more ‘symphonic’ or ‘ambient’. But most of these elements were present since our early days and our demo, so it’s a matter of redistributing the elements every time rather than adding something new. Even when it comes to the aforementioned progressive elements in our sound, I still remember early reviews hearing Tangerine Dream or Pink Floyd in our albums, so I guess they were always there!
To answer the second part of your question: I don’t feel completely disconnected from the funeral doom genre. We still have a lot in common with bands described as playing this style; for starters there are way too few of us on stages worldwide so the tag still has some uniqueness and atmosphere associated with it, and that’s how I like it!
A little more specific about the Pantheist sound. When your self-titled album came out in 2011 I was stunned by the musical change I heard, mainly a song like the exquisite ‘Be Here’, a crowd favorite, was for me a surprisingly nice turn in the Pantheist sound I was used to before. That progressive almost Anathema/Yes/Camel-like direction did continue but not as rigorously as I might have thought at the time. Can you go back again to the moment of creation of ‘Pantheist’. What drove you then, creatively and what made its successor, ‘Seeking Infinity’, sound different after all?
The self-titled album followed up ‘Journey Through Lands Unknown’. This is quite important in the big scheme of things. JTLU was wildly progressive and unconventional, and it was purposefully so as a ‘statement of intent’. It was a reaction against the doom metal orthodoxy we were up against for many years before it, a musical ‘fuck you’ to those who make rules for the genre.
The self-titled album was a deliberate attempt to make a more coherent album again, something not as wildly eclectic, but rather consistent. The tracks we came up with were more accessible and melodic, so my mission was to ‘make an album that even my mum would love’. Well, my mum still doesn’t love it, I think, but nevertheless the mission was accomplished, in particular with tracks like ‘Be Here’. Even recently, when we played at Gothic Doom fest in Brecon, some random people who had walked into the venue, became fans just by listening to it performed live, and they weren’t really much into metal!
‘Seeking Infinity’ was a different beast altogether. The idea was to make something more brutal, a return to a heavier yet still atmospheric sound. And I think that again, we succeeded!
Not only because of the fact that Pantheist formed all the way back in 2000, but also because of your personal moves (from Antwerp via London now to Cardiff), the band has had a constantly rotating line-up in which you yourself have remained the only constant. Does this also mean that you hold the musical compass and more or less determine what Pantheist’s music sounds like, or is this still a process of all souls involved? Can you take me into the creative process behind a Pantheist song?
Yes I have always been the main songwriter of the band. However, I will need to disappoint anyone who thinks that this means the band is run in a dictatorial way. I am quite open-minded about allowing other people’s ideas into the compositions, in fact I encourage them because I believe that’s how you get the most of everyone in a band. I am more of the ‘big picture’ guy, will come up with the main ideas for the track, the structure, most of the arrangements, all of the lyrics etc. But usually, my demos leave a lot of room for interpretation of other musicians. I particularly leave a lot of room for the guitar players to express themselves (as I’m not a great guitarist myself), so people like Nicolas, Ilia, Frank or more recently Jeremy have had a lot of input into the compositions!
In recent photos of your shows, I see you in a religious robe, something fitting for the band’s sacred and organ-heavy sound, but what also caught my eye and somewhat surprised me was that you were holding a copy of the Necronomicon. The Necronomicon, or “Book Of The Dead”, is in fact a fictional book created by H.P. Lovecraft. I had never associated Pantheist with Lovecraftian themes before, how exactly is this?
This image was developed from ‘Fthagn-Nagh’, an experimental ambient track we composed for the Quake soundtrack of the map with the same name. The map, as the name implies, has strong Lovecraftian themes and was developed by a level designer who is a big fan of Thergothon and Pantheist (that’s how I got in touch with him, one of the few good things that Twitter has ever done!).
To support this release, I did a photoshoot session at home by myself wearing my priest suit (which I had recently ordered for live performances) and holding my copy of Simon’s Necronomicon, a beautiful looking book. This photo was then manipulated by a Mexican fan, to make it look darker and grimmer. We also used it as the bandcamp cover for the single (streaming services rejected it as they didn’t like the Necronomicon being used as an album cover, but that’s another story…).
After a few gigs, when I was wondering what to do during the intro we usually play before our performances, I started standing there holding the book in my hand recreating the album cover on stage. It looked really cool so I continued doing it.
A subject I like to discuss with bands that have been around awhile is the concept of time. Time is a curious thing, it changes everything; sometimes it brings beauty but it can also show decay. How has time changed you as a person and musician when you look back to when you started the band, as a young twenty-something?
Time is a curious concept; we could be talking about it and what it means the whole day and hope one day we can do so face-to-face accompanied by a few drinks! I think it has changed me a lot as a person, but this is not a change you realize has happened on a day-to-day basis. You only notice gradually, over time. A few years ago, I watched for the first time after many years a video Chery had taken of me during the time of the aforementioned Funeral Procession tour in 2003. I was deeply disappointed in myself and couldn’t believe how childish and stupid I came across. However, I’m sure that had you asked me at the time, I would have said that I am a very serious and mature person!
Likewise, I have changed a lot as a musician too, but this is a change I have been able to track and measure to some extent. I still have all these wild and eclectic ideas about the music I want to make, but I have become much more efficient, or perhaps cynical about which of these ideas I am filtering through and allow to be used in my recordings! I have also started paying more attention to musical details such as production, how particular instruments interact together etc but this is a logical part of learning and maturing as a musician.
Over the last few months you guys have played some great shows, the most interesting and impressive must have been your performance at Organic Doom. A show where you guys played at the Huddersfield Town Hall using a real church organ. When I saw the footage it felt to me, as a relative outsider, like this was Pantheist as you had always envisioned it, it now all came out in its full splendor, power and emotion. How do you look back on this experience?
I think you are spot on there; it was a unique experience, the sort of thing that makes you think afterwards ‘that’s why I am doing this for’. I have used church organ sounds since our ‘1000 years demo’ so to see some of these parts (including the actual ‘1000 years’ intro from our demo) performed on a pipe organ, as they should be, was an experience I still can’t quite describe. Hearing that composition being played live on that massive instrument right behind me, with an audience of 300 people in front of me, 22 years after it was conceived, certainly did something to me! We have captured the audio and video of that performance quite well and I’m sure it will be the sort of thing I will be returning to in years to come when I want to reflect on and reminisce about this period of the band.
I touched on it briefly earlier, Pantheist is slowly sliding towards its 25th anniversary. Looking back on your musical career with the band, what are your fondest memories and what would you like your audience to remember? Also, is there perhaps something you would rather forget as soon as possible?
The fondest memories as a band are always those where you feel there is a connection with the people you share the music with, when there is a mutual understanding and something like a ‘community’. The gigs we played, like the Huddersfield performance we discussed above, or our gig at St Giles in the Fields back in 2012…but also online and offline discussions with people sharing views about music and life in general, time you have spent with band mates in the studio or in a van traveling to gigs, personal messages I get from people saying how much our music has helped them with their mental health, or parents fondly sharing how they listen to Pantheist together with their young children…these are the sort of things you always cherish and remember over the years.
And yes, there were also bad periods I would rather forget, such as the time when a band member wasted three years of the band’s potential, without which experience we would have recorded at least one more album…but those experiences are luckily few in the big scheme of things and can always serve as learnings for the furure.
‘Closer To God’ is now about two years old, which naturally raises the question of how the new material is coming together now. What can we expect from Pantheist in the coming period?
We are currently laying the final touch to the new Pantheist EP which should appear early next year. I can reveal, exclusively for your magazine, that it will contain new material as well as the polished recordings of our gig at Huddersfield Town Hall with a live pipe organist!
Other than that, we are still rebuilding our live profile as a ‘Welsh’ band and there will be several gigs played in 2024 to promote the new album, hopefully some of which will lead us closer to your neck of the woods (but further from God…).
For me personally, it is always fun to interview someone I have known for almost two decades now, so I would like to thank you very much for your time and insights. In case you feel I forgot something, the last words are for you…
Thank you from my end too Felix, your questions were thoughtful and interesting, and it felt more like a conversation with an old friend rather than a formal interview. Stay doomed everyone, for we are living in strange times…
