'temporary perspectives' is a set of recordings i'd been working on, on and off for a good part of 2008 and 2009. The pieces only fell in place last spring and some of the mixes kept me occupied during the summer months and early autumn.
contrary to previous studio-based constructions, this one can lay claim to a general "theme" in that it expressly focuses on the experience of biorythms and issues of human perception. It's interesting to see where things will go from here, seeing that -after 'perspectives'- i've been focusing more an more on untampered improvised playing. Though more immediate and 'true', my current practice makes it more difficult to translate these specific issues/feelings into sound. Somehow inconvenient, but welcome as a challenge.
I've been making some tentative attempts to present this disc to some music labels, for the moment i can present here an excerpt from the first track:
none of them music-related, save for a pretty dark shot of the 'decentred' quartet, setting up for a set at cafe oto during the unnamed music festival last june.
syndromes sister overdrive is the duo of myself (syndromes) & giannis kotsonis (sister overdrive). We played together for the first time as part of the 501/502 concerts that took place in athens and thessaloniki earlier this year; we performed in the athens concert. This was actually only the second time we played together (first time was the previous night at giannis' practice space), but the results were quite satisfying. Things are not always very stable with this duo, because we tend to process each others sounds a lot, but on this occasion i think we held back quite a bit and the music benefited as a result.
below is the recording of our set at kinky kong. The sound is a bit boxy, since it was recorded from a camcoder microphone, but i find it captures most of the music quite well
here's a list of the record reviews i've written over the past few months (not many of them, i should really spend more time doing this). All of them in greek, and hosted by tranzistor.
my tender, florist-bred bamboo branch passed away a few weeks ago, but the one that came from IKEA seems to be doing quite alright...no real music news, as i'm endlessly restructuring an old project i have laying in my hard drive. also putting some work on the label, but that's a different story. next week i will be attending the two London dates of the unnamed music festival, which should provide some food for thought over the next months (anyone reading this, say hello if you're there).
external staircases are quite rare in greek homes, and when one makes an appearance it is more often the main staircase for the building, than it is an emergency one. i don't recall which was the case here, all i know is i wouldn't climb that thing
a piece i had recorded during the .accumulated days, but subsequently shelved, is now available online as part of the bagatellen listen series. this is a very simple, but effective piece, it consists mainly of laptop feedback that i later treated with compression effects. i then shaped the structure of the piece by injecting some silence & found sound near the end of the track.
since this never seemed to fit with any of the other stuff i'd record before and afterwards, i sort-of jumped at the opportunity given to present it on its own. thanks to bagatellen for making this possible.
my new disc, named 'just another daily bummer' and released under the semi-alias of 'syndromes / kostis kilymis', is now out on organized music from thessaloniki.
it is my first 100% live recording & mainly contains extended passages of controlled noise. It is a joyous recording! It was released in a very limited edition of 55 copies and i'm now down to the very last one. It can still be found though, in good local record stores, at erstdist in the us & sound323 in the uk.
you can get a taste of the first track here. you won't really get the whole picture, but still...
i've been wanting to make/play music for a long time, i just never knew what kind of music i could or wanted to actually play.
thanks to nicolas malevitsis (of absurd fame) and since late 2006 i've found myself closer to quite a few experimental music events taking place in greece. I've been doing what i can, carrying bags, picking up folks from airports, watching some great shows, etc. Somewhere along the way i followed a whole 3-date tour that valerio tricoli did in northern greece (you can read my reflections on it here) & it was during that time that i picked up the basic tracks for this release.
starting from live recordings of the shows & from basic tracks that valerio had recorded for the xanthi performance, and with no clear directions or ideas in my head, i extracted some small snippets of sound & subjected them to various kinds of computer processing. Some of them were looped, some were stretched, pitch-shifted or overlaid thousands of times on themselves, some were manipulated with live effects. As months went by, i added crude recordings i was myself making, and worked the sounds into what i considered to be distinct tracks or compositions.
aching to put some kind of "music" out in the world, and lacking the patience or experience that this thing requires, i demoed a sequence of the tracks to friends and was met with my very first (& very beneficiary) run of blank faces. Seeing that each track suffered from very clearly being the elaboration of one specific sound element, i decided to muddle things up. I would structure the tracks in a continuous whole. From then on i started finding joints, connections, spaces in which separate tracks could coexist. Details i had painstakingly worked on were obscured in the process, tracks were altogether discarded, but at the same time i got my first taste in actually aiming at a coherent musical statement.
the result continues to surprise me each time i hear it, not that i find it to be very surprising music, but due to the process of its completion there are always juxtapositions in it that catch me off guard. The title of the disc was chosen due to the fact that i saw the finished disc as a travelogue of some sort, and it also has to do with my fascination of field & memory-recording. Thessaloniki was chosen as a destination because it is my home town, but the year 1963 was chosen as a year that i could detect no connection with. As such the diary alluded to in the title is an imaginary one, possible but not actual. The whole thing is closer to the idea of the diary as a listing of details, experiences & so on...
the sleeves for this release are a different story. I chose a cloth decorated with floral patterns, inspired by the silkscreened floral patterns found on the sleeves of Campbell Kneale's 'Celebrate Psi Phenomenon' label. Together with Grigoria Vryttia, i found a second cloth to accompany the first one, and Grigoria then spent a good few weeks assembling the two cloths into small cd-carrying pouches such as the one in the image above. We made 98 cdr copies of the disc, none were intended for sale, some were traded, but most of them were given away to friends, associates or unsuspecting visiting artists.
it feels nice to start this blog by making this available again as it's had a curious life. Online it's been rescued from obscurity at least once by 'the cookshop' and it was through their page that a current collaborator of mine first heard of my music, so an arbitrary thumbs-up to all the earnest file-sharing blogs out there.
PS: if the link doesn't work for some reason, drop me a line in the comments box to put it back up
ever since he put out the 'The Brave and the Bold' album with Tortoise, i secretly hoped that Will Oldham would slowly morph into an r'n'b/soul crooner. Unfortunately, a few years later this seems unlikely as ever. That said, this spoof video that someone pointed to a couple of weeks ago in ihm, is as close as we'll probably get
random content, as in youtube videos, uploads of my own music, mixtapes, photography, words, links, news, etc. a placeholder for everything in between, personal or impersonal
