thanks to everyone. especially
-guys and gals in thessaloniki who created the perfect atmosphere for us to kickstart the tour. very concentrated set, very very quiet in the best way. great feeling all around. big shout out to the granny crew
-fex/pakethra in xanthi who were the best of possible hosts, the way only they can be. people in xanthi who put up with us :)
-folks in athens who were terribly excited about so many aspects of what we did. great vibes all around.
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
thanks to p.faderios for filming this under extreme circumstances. thanks to knot, tot, and the artists, who were responsible for a very beautiful weekend down in athens (see previous post).
nn+, on this occasion, was nicolas malevitsis, nektarios papadimitriou & kostis kilymis. we break more turntables
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:
"Secret Earth was recorded on a 4-track and on a videocassette machine. So, it's using two source recordings and then uploaded to a computer, and then the vocal tracks in. So, it's very very basic..."
what amazes me is not the fact that these guys can pull this off. Not even that i don't care how their stuff is recorded. But most of all it amazes me that, when i hear it, i don't even categorize it as "lo-fi music" of any kind. At the end of the day it's just pure kick-ass music. And, perhaps more importantly, it gets across as such and doesn't get stuck between labels and tags.
