t16
cd edition
300 copies
€ 12 (including international postage)

also available as a digital download through bandcamp
(where you can also stream the music for a quick preview)

Ferran Fages: electric guitar and walkie-talkie
Composed, recorded and mixed by Ferran Fages from May to September 2009
Mastering by Pau Torres

Photography by Pau Torres
Layout by Kostis Kilymis

-

It is hard getting away from the dedicatory title of this album. It’s not that it is unusual in itself, simply that a dedication like this usually implies a debt of some sort. On this occasion it is not hard to guess, given that Pau Torres is the person behind etude records, the label that put out quite a few discs Ferran has been involved in in the past years, most notably his two guitar cds ‘Cançons per a un lent retard’ and ‘Al voltant d’ un para/.lel’. So that’s reason enough for a dedication, at least in my book.

It wouldn’t be out of place to compare Pau Torres with the two guitar cds mentioned above. With them Ferran –known up until a few years ago mostly for his turntable and electronics skills- staked out a different territory for himself, one that involved melodic and chromatic explorations that were quite distanced from the textural nature of improvised music at the turn of the century. Now this new album removes itself quite a bit from the dissonant fields of the above works and delivers a thick slice of reverberating guitar explorations. Bracketed by two pieces of innovative feedback constructions, the main part of the record is Ferran at his most evocative, touching upon nocturnal tones and employing longer time structures than his previous work has gotten us used to. As such, Pau Torres is at its most effective at album length, tracing out the outlines of some invisible yet enveloping story and establishing its own and individual touch. And maybe that’s what the title is all about, maybe there is some untold story behind this, or maybe a whole story actually developed out of the two people involved -Pau’s pictures that accompany the album certainly tell their own tale alongside the music- but I’ll wager that in the 42 minutes of this disc, you won’t be needing any stories to be lending meaning to this music.

t17 / q12
split cassette / download edition
100 copies, on pink cassette
€ 8 (including international postage)

also available as a digital download through bandcamp
(where you can also stream the music for a quick preview)

a: unan – mimus [21:29]
[chris chondropoulos: vinyl, turntable, processing]
b: nikos kyriazopoulos – skua [18:06]
[nikos kyriazopoulos: analog electronics]

co-produced with a question of re_entry
a question of re_entry #12

-

This split-in-two-sides cassette pairs two greek artists’ responses on the subject of birdsong. Some time ago Nicolas Malevitsis (of absurd fame) asked them to contribute a piece each, on the sole premise that the work would be based, or derive from, bird sounds. Unan (aka Chris Chondropoulos) brought back a curious collage work called ‘mimus’, built from the sounds and textures of scratchy vinyl culled over time by the artist from athens’ record shops. Focusing on structure and reflecting avian language on another medium, Chondropoulos delivers an unanticipated little gem of musique concrete . Of ’skua’, Nikos Kyriazopoulos only very cryptically says that he ”had no other choice but to tweak some knobs”. He was obviously not very interested in revealing methods and technical details, on a piece that speaks for itself by aligning its analog electronics uncannily close to birdsong in a creatively mimetic fashion. This side as well, isn’t any more lacking in thrills, and it makes for a perfect companion piece in this curious little ode to one of humanity’s most favorite muses.

Unan (Chris Chondropoulos) is an Athens based multi-percussionist and electronic music producer. Apart from his personal projects, he also appears as a member of the experimental band Xysm.

Nikos Kyriazopoulos works on a wide range of interests, from the sound of human invention to the natural landscape and hydrophony. He also designs atavistic soundscapes using filters, microphones and self-constructed electronics. Experiential hearing and the bodily felt sense is what characterizes his live performances.

ferran fages – for pau torres cd
pascal battus, alfredo costa monteiro – fêlure cd
christos chondropoulos, nikos kyriazopoulos – split cs
muura – cs

I’m pretty happy (and relieved) to announce the two latest editions on organized music, one a cd the other a cassette. Both by Greek artists active in the local and intenational music scene and both find their creators in top form, fresh documents by two great emerging musicians. First is the ‘Honey’ cassette by Sister Overdrive, an eclectic 38min trip down electroacoustic and noise byways. Then there’s the solo debut by one Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, titled ‘Stroke by Stroke’. Dimitra, who we first met in the ap’strophe duo with Ferran Fages (see their two albums on etude and another timbre), lays here a forceful statement using and mis-using a zither as well as objects she usually keeps around. Like her aformentioned duo, this is seriously uncompromising stuff, the kind that truly deserves to be labeled as a “personal statement”.

Please scroll down or click on the titles to see details on each release. Bandcamp downloads will be up soon (already up for ‘Honey’ actually) for those of you who are digitally inclined. Once again, thank you for your part in bringing forward this beautiful music.

t14
cd edition
400 copies
€ 12 (including international postage)

also available as a digital download through bandcamp
(where you can also stream the music for a quick preview)

Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga: zither, objects
all the recordings were made at home in athens between june 2010 and april 2011
all tracks perfromed solo, with the exception of 05 and 17, which were performed with the aid of Michalis Kyratsous.
no electronic effects, overdubbing or processing used.

mastered by Ferran Fages
cover design by ourwork.is

http://www.strokebystroke.net/

Dimitra is one half of the duo ap’strophe, with Ferran Fages
http://www.apstrophe.net/

-

Jesse Goin writes on Stroke by Stroke (you can read the full text in his blog here)

On Stroke by Stroke, the windows in Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga’s house are thrown open; you can hear the streets of Athens enlaced in her apothegmatic pieces for a radically prepared and refashioned zither. Knowing this, anyone even somewhat alert to the events in the streets of Athens from May of 2010 to the present, almost precisely the period of time bracketing the home recordings heard on Stroke by Stroke, will inevitably bend their ear for aural evidence of the crisis and conflagrations staged in the public spaces of Athens. I do not hear the explicit sounds of police brutality or the massive organization of strikes and demonstrations conveyed with heavy-handedness, say, by dint of T.V. or radio captures, or troweled on with field recordings. I do hear alarm [and alarms], pieces bearing up under tremendous tension and distress, the sounds of sheared metal, what sounds like bowed iron gates, and the unnerving shuttle of warp beams on a ghostly loom. Chatzigoga has articulated [or as the poet Michaux has it, more surgically, auscultated] the spirit of her adopted city with great subtlety, juxtaposing the mechanized and harsh strokes of some of the 21 tracks, with moments of calm, clarity and tenderness.

The title Chatzigoga chose for her solo release comes from a late collection of prose poems and ideogramatic ink drawings by the French poet Henri Michaux. Chatzigoga has chosen well, as one can easily unpack multiple apposite meanings from stroke by stroke; listen to the full- spectrum, tactile approach she takes to this oldest of folk instruments. Caresses and dandles are at play, but you would expect that with a zither – what I was not expecting are the sounds of saxophone multiphonics, granulated train whistles, inchoate radio signals, looped looms and, as baffling as anything heard across the 21 strokes sounded here, unmistakable, sustained sine tones.

Chatzigoga has reimagined her chosen instrument and remapped its territories like only a few artists I can conjure up who have produced anything remotely similar to Stroke By Stroke– Annette Krebs […]; here and there that other Berlin guitarist who practiced a rigorous, but less radical erasure of his instrument’s baggage, Hans Reichel; Andrea Neumann, whose innerklavier bears some overlapping resonances ; and to my ears, most remarkably, Arek Gulbenkoglu, the Melbourne-based guitarist whose 2005 release Points Alone, for solo acoustic guitar, owns a strikingly similar quality of subverting whatever possibilities and parameters you thought obtained in a solo work for an acoustic stringed instrument.

t15
cassette / download edition
100 copies
€ 8 (including international postage)

also available as a digital download through bandcamp
(where you can also stream the music for a quick preview)

Giannis Kotsonis: electronics

photography by Kiko
recorded 2010-2011

http://soundcloud.com/manichope

-

[update] paypal issues have been resolved and the shop seems to work again. Apologies to anyone who was affected