i'd written about this here, and now it's finally coming out (on my own label no less). It will be available soon, but for now there's also a full stream of the whole thing here. Send me your thoughts and comments on this, it's a nice record i think
before i start a projected "avalance" of posts (by the standards of this blog anyway), thought i'd put up an oldie, something i'm still quite proud of, despite its very "basic" construction:
this is pretty much the first thing i ever did. it was made using an apple powerbook's internal microphone + audacity. first appeared here http://www.noquam.com/ihatemusic/ihm_comp/main.html . different version appeared later on my ".accumulated" cdr [organized music from thessaloniki, 2008]
here's a recording that rounds up the previous two posts i've put up. it doesn't contain any sound from the performance (you can check the video if you want a taste of the juicy parts), but consists instead of a quick recording i did while setting up our equipment.
the whole story goes a little bit like this: michalis kyratsous, corinna triantafyllidis & knot were organizing the TOT1.0 festival which would consist of perfrormances from two visiting musicians, a strong presence of local musicians and the usual cross-polination. In the process they thought it'd be a good idea to have some kind of dj set to open the fest; a different kind of dj set, though one that would add some spice to the usually clinical mood of improv nights. For this reason they called up nicolas malevitsis & nektarios papadimitriou who were thrilled with the idea and agreed on spot; they also suggested i got a leave from the army in order to be part of the set standing between the two of them, mixing the whole thing.
i had vague ideas of how intrusive i was going to be in what they did, but upon arriving in athens i realized that even they (up to the last minute) were not really very clear about who was playing what. In the end nicolas alternated between RRR-related noise and trashbin-variety 70s and 80s pop records from all over the map, while nektarios played some of his ultra-rare freakishly original exotic pop 7"s, and i was left with deciding on when to switch channels between weirdo songwriting and pure noise (adding a little spice of the brown noise variety along the way). That's half of the story of course, because after the "normal" sets of the first night we resumed our positions (with our friends ilan and dimitris joining in), quickly did away with any pop residues that were left in our system, and proceeded with a glorious full-on noise/equipment trashing/audience participation thing (see video in the previous post).
as i said though, this is not where this recording's from. this is from when i set-up my mixing board, 4-track, microphone and pedals along with the guys' 2 turntables. while everyone was elsewhere doing better things, i put on the first 2 records i could find, set-up some feedback on the board and ended up with this rough-but-charming intro to what was soon to take place that night
staying for the better part of the year in the lovely city of Xanthi (in the greek northeast), but in a less than ideal situation, i've spent most of my free time doing random walks in the city (mostly in the older part). With my trusted minidisc at hand i've turned some of those walks into soundwalks. Some of the sounds captured you can listen here:
'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:
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
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
