In its captivating portrayal of, ‘a musical trip from Greece & the Balkans to the West’ and its ‘refashioning of Greek & Balkan music traditions in a post-modern context’, Labyrinth’s Path, the debut album of multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer Christos Pappas, announced the emergence of a new and highly original voice in contemporary European music. Now, 10 years after the album’s release, Coral Caves has returned with a vital new sound and direction.

‘Moiroloi’, the second single to be released from the upcoming album (the first, ‘This night love bleeds’ appeared in mid 2020) is described by Pappas as a passionate lament, typically born of regret or mourning. The lament is one of the oldest song forms, appearing both in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and in the elegiacs accompanied by the aulos in Classical and Hellenistic Greece. In the musical traditions of Epirus, the Moiroloi is commonly accompanied by the clarinet and is often performed at folk festivals and weddings, in the former case to acknowledge those who ‘went away’, having either migrated or ‘passed away’, and in the latter to honour the bride who is about to leave her family. Pappas describes such performances as ‘group-music-therapy, where loss and grief are expressed, and the soul emptied to make space for new emotions, enabling the subject once again to feel, communicate and express joy’. The ‘Moiroloi’ is usually then followed by a more rhythmical song of a ‘Dionysian’ character, leading to state of ‘ecstasis’.   Christos comments that: “In Moiroloi I tried to express these same sentiments but in a more nostalgic than mournful fashion, aiming to encapsulate the universal sense of these emotions. This is perhaps best expressed in the following beautiful line that comes to mind from Shakespeare’s Macbeth ‘…life’s but a walking shadow..’”.

OUT in All Major Web-stores on 14/6/2021 by CPS-Records.