Not long ago I wrote about a band I just discovered called Skinner Box, and how that album reminded me of my interest in bands anywhere near the Dead Can Dance orbit in the early to mid 90s. Άβατον was part of that initial adventure for me. RYM calls this "Ancient Greek Music" which is absurd. I mean what says "ancient" like synthesizers and beats, eh? Άβατον is to Ancient Greek Music what Enigma's MCMXC a.D. is to Gregorian Chant Music. That is to say it's highly influential and provides the melodic and musical scale backbone. So yes, this album is in that DCD orbit I spoke of earlier. Άβατον provides a hypnotic music, very much of its era, and is enjoyable on the whole for fans of the aforementioned bands and styles.
Ownership: LP: 1991 Music Box. Purchased new in 1994 from Michael Piper. The LP is housed in a fine gatefold. As far as the title goes, I tried in vain to add ANV's (Alternate Name Variation) to Discogs so that you can actually find the album on the site or on Google. But the zombie eyed freaks that plague that place refused to allow me that "ridiculous" request. So what you have to do is go to RYM, and type in Abaton, and they have the good sense to leave the name there so you can then cut and paste Άβατον into Discogs. Ah - there it is now. That's just stupid. As if all the world's keyboards have Greek letters (yes, of course one could seek out the ASCII characters, as if that's easy). Making matters worse though, is that the spine and labels clearly say Abaton. This is how the album was known in the West. Sorry, it just was. Now before any linguists get all frothy about this, I certainly understand that it's just the type set. That Abaton is closer to Avaton, and that Άβατον is proper. That's not the point. It's about practicality. I realize it can be this way in Cyrillic or any other non Western character form as well. As mentioned, to locate this album in Discogs (or anywhere else), one has to go to great lengths to find it. These guys won an academic argument at the expense of discovery and knowledge. Genius.
Avaton is the correct pronunciation. I'm familiar with the album as I distributed some quantities of it from Bengium where I resided back at the times. It is correct that they do not have anything to do with "ancient greek" music as they are a mellow atmospheric "prog" gone "wave" style, sitting between mid period Dead Can Dance and Legendary Pink Dots. The main reason they were associated with "ancient Greece" is that their lyrics (of ancient lesbian poetress Sapfo) were sang in their original ancient language and that they used acouple of string instruments of archaic descent. But nothing more to my ears.
ReplyDeleteSadly their 2nd and final album did not live up to the expectations of their debut.
Thanks Spyros! I knew you would have a deeper background on this one :-)
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