organized music from thessaloniki 01, cdr edition of 98 copies
(download @ 256 kbps .m4a)
details & reviews in the label's webpage
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
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
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