hi

long since the last update or at least i think so.
so just out is cranc’s ‘copper fields’ cd co-produced with organized music from thessaloniki. in brief a noise-below release.
marks the 2nd cranc release exactly after a decade since their first ‘all angels’ cd on edo records and is far more different in style. listening both of them you may see the difference and progress (depnends on your opinion if is progress or whatever) the trio did in their sound search the last decade.
it also marks the end of absurd and an almost 14 year journey comes to its end.

there are various plans in mind for future projects not as intense as absurd at least at the moment (well absurd started like that in 96 you might say and then…). in early / mid july a new project starts and will be the main vehicle for this decade. also important as a vehicle is the ‘outside my window’ blog. my greatest interest wth it is field recordings but never sayno for proper mp3/flac releases. already a dead gum mp3 is uploaded also a binaural field recording of a specific site of the city of kalamata as recorded by nikos kyriazopoulos last april while cycling in the city.
check http://thenoisehitthemastheyopenedthedoor.blogspot.com

slowly will keep upldating the ‘story so far’ blog http://allnoisesswelltogetherinlandscapes.blogspot.com as still there are shitloads waiting to be uploaded.

also a kind of posthumous release is a 10″ by tasos stamou. a recording of a party held for the birthday of a friend’s daughter last july in the village of nea triglia in halkidiki, north greece. guess sometime in july will be out too.

as has happened with any project unearthed from the genital grinder zine saga and on a ‘link’ between absurd and the new project that is in the works will be a special release somehow the ‘official’ final a 7″ by howard stelzer & frans de waard which is nothing else than another brick on the ‘torn tongue’ wall they slowly built. i assume that it’ll be out sometime in september or october.

speaking of posthumous releases as well the ‘adieu absurd’ party thing will take place on saturday the 4th in the city of xanthi. further details to be announced sometime later during the year.

also ‘a question of re_entry’ has almost fulfilled its idea. a final co-production cdr is due for release sometime in 2010 and will mark its end as well.

hhmm guess that’s all for now. sometime in july will email infos on the new project, its first release, etc.

love & noise
nicolas

Tags: a question of re_entry, absurd, sites/blogs

a link to nicolas’ blog, ‘outside my window‘, where you can find available for downloading a recording of ilan manouach’s solo set at the xanthi folk museum last autumn.

ilan is a graphic artist as well as a formidable saxophone player whose work often flirts with noise. In the case of this concert (original post about it here) things got a bit out-of-hand, so much that ilan himself thought the recording was somehow defective when we played it back some days later. a very strong gig, get it here:

http://thenoisehitthemastheyopenedthedoor.blogspot.com/2010/05/ilan-manouach-live-at-xanthi-folk.html

Tags: ilan manouach, sites/blogs, xanthi

introducing orila… I should have introduced orila a long time ago. orila is the ‘online phonographic workshop’ (rough translation) set up by yiannis iasonidis and specialising on guerilla concepts of record-releasing. Blank cdrs with to burn your downloadable music on; check. Special, unmarketable 3″ covers for the special edition, while you market the clear plastic sleeve edition; check. “Regular” cdr edition where each 10 copies or so have a different bit added to the cover because the label boss got new ideas in between; check. Amazing record sleeves that get constructed before the actual music gets recorded; check. Needless to say, we love orila, and it’s silly that we haven’t professed our love to orila all this time. I’m sorry orila, sometimes i get distracted.

Now comes the Ku edition. In two handmade versions, one a cool tape edition and the other a really out-there tape+decorated walkman edition, ready to listen to. Insane levels of cool of course. Did i mention that you can also just choose to download the thing?

the music contained is (as hinted) by Ku, aka Dimitris Papadatos. It was played live on an e-radio show, and comes “filled with obsessions, burst outs and romance. Kraut inflictions, dark vocals, drones and high frequencies transforming to birds.”

more info here:
http://www.orila.net/
http://kulttofthesilent.blogspot.com/

Tags: ku, orila

our mailing lists are down

having less time to dedicate on the site these past few months, i only recently realised that the database behind our mailing lists has ceased to function. This means that both the ‘absurd’ and the ‘organized music from thessaloniki’ labels’ mailing lists are not in operation. I have tried in vain to fix this problem, but at the moment i cannot even salvage the subscribers’ email addresses. Which means that those people who will not read this entry, might have to wait a long time befor they receive anything new from those lists. My apologies for this.

For the time being, you are encouraged to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed as an alternative. It will contain any info that would have apeared in those lists, as well as other news from related labels and artists. Or just keep an eye on our pages, the old-fashioned way.

Even though i myself still favor mailing lists and their succinct notifications, maybe this will prove to be a way forward since more and more people today seem to depend on automatic notifications. I’m afraid we don’t have another choice for now

Tags: absurd, organized music from thessaloniki

by yiorgis sakellariou

Last summer I visited the island of Kithira and stayed there for a few days. Besides the expected “beautiful sunny beaches”, which, I have to admit, I don’t really like that much, the island also offered some quite more interesting landscapes (and soundscapes of course), like the one near the village of Mylopotamos. The little river and the summer insects provided an ideal soundtrack for a summer’s day. Indeed relaxing, but also relatively loud, the “sounds of nature”, rich and full of micro-details, always attract my attention and motivate me to record them. That’s a far better way to spend my holidays than getting sunburnt on a –disturbingly- windy beach.

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Tags: field recording mini-series, mecha/orga, yiorgis sakellariou

the buzz has been on for quite some time now around Veroia’s finest beat-maker Larry Gus (Panagiotis Melidis). While he’s no stranger to these underground waters (see older posts here), he’s been steadily making a name for himself as a (non-exclusively) hip-hop artist. Just released on the Greek ‘cast-a-blast’ label is his smashing sampladelic summer trip called ‘Stitches’. Great as the album is (close to fucking fantastic), panagiotis is -in some circles- loved even more for his inimitable, border-like neurotic, train-of-thought talk. On the occasion of his new album, you have a taste of those ramblings in an interview he gave to the greek music zine mic.gr here

if you want more, there’s always his blog

of course, a taste of his music is even better. More info on his label’s site here

Tags: larry gus

by yiorgis sakellariou

Here’s another location from Syria, this time from the south of the country. I left Damascus to visit the ancient city of Palmyra. On the highway, the “Iraq =>” signs made me feel quite weird as I was naively thinking that a small mistake by the driver could lead us to really unknown territories. After a few hours, we had to make a necessary stop. In the middle of nowhere was this little resting place/café called “Café Baghdad”. Although I was actually in a desert, I did not experience the completely silent soundscape, like I did the previous time I was in a similar environment (that was in Wadi Rum, in Jordan). The reason was the constant motor sound of the water pump that was probably used to provide electricity to “Baghdad Café”. I could not resist getting very close and record it. This sample was the only sound that I used for the opening track of my “61:50” release on the Triple Bath label.

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Tags: field recording mini-series, mecha/orga, yiorgis sakellariou

long since the last piece of news… perhaps the reason why is that my life goes under rapid changes the last 2-3 months and reorganise things down here at the central.

on the other hand thanks to these changes found the proper time to rearrange my space and try to organize absurd’s archive (or at least i tried to).

and in the meantime new releases… 3 in a row on ‘a question of re_entry’ plus the vinyl issue of ‘akustiche aktion’ in conjuction with pan records to celebrate sudden infant’s 20th anniversary.

the blogs have remained silent too but is a matter of time to reactivate them and upload a hell of stuff…

apologies also to those whose emails i might have forgotten to answer.. if you are one of them pls drop a line again!

hhhmm… guess that’s all… not much in the pipeline either. plans are to try to reduce releases in 2010 to some 3 or 5 maximum. we’ll see.

next week also sees daylight a stellar electroacoustic 7″ by socrates martinis (aka blanco estira nuestra, helice pied, nixilx nijilx, etc – well changes names faster than the speed of light so i won’t be suprised to see in the future a sign quoted as ‘the artist formely knows as socrates martinis’)

also together with my friends thalia & aggelos of 0600am blog http://0600am.blogspot.com/ we issued a limited to 100 7″ on our fictional rekem records (infos on what rekem stands for can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra) influenced thanks to this book http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/8-10-2005-74577.asp of a fridge recording done in weimar sometime earlier this year. you can download the track from their blog. 7″s were handed for free and not sure where you can track them down or not (‘ve got very few even for me) however drop a line and you can never know.

guess that’s all for now. more news to come in november/december with more surprises as well….

love & noise
nicolas

[release details coming up -admin]

Tags: absurd, rekem

by yiorgis sakellariou

The city of Yaroslavl was the last stop of my tour in Russia, in October 2008. Before the concert, I and the other participants of the festival had some free time and a walk along the Volga River was proved to be an excellent suggestion. I was listening to and recording the machine which was being used in the construction of a dock, hammering in long steel stakes in the ground. A rhythmic metallic loop was created, resonating all over the area, as the sound was also reverberating at the other side of the river. My excitement was obvious and so my fellow artists were kind and patient enough to wait for me until the hammering process ended. Of course, the idea of immediately editing the recording and using it in the evening’s performance did cross my mind but I find myself rather unwieldy in these situations. Needless to say though, the specific sample of the recording was finally used in a concert, at Kinky Kong, in Athens, a few months later.

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Tags: field recording mini-series, mecha/orga, yiorgis sakellariou

in what we hope will become a regular “column”, we present two locations, as recorded, photographed and described by yiorgis sakellariou (mecha/orga). The original idea was to examine the relation between the act of field-recording itself and its use in an artist’s finished work. To focus on what the recordist sees/looks for in a location chosen to be recorded and in turn how he/she sees the recorded material, when the time comes to use it in one’s actual creation.

in this case, because he usually manipulates field recordings beyond recognition, yiorgis felt he didn’t have much to add as far as the subsequent use of said recordings was concerned. He chose simply to document these two locations in a form of audio diary. You might want to turn the volume slightly up, or not -depends on whether you like your field recordings raw or medium-rare.

feel free to contact us with any suggestions for future entries.

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2 locations by yiorgis sakellariou

Collodi, Tuscany, Italy

This little village in Tuscany is famous for giving its name to the author of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi, and attracts visitors mostly because of the “Pinocchio theme park” which seemed to me a bit like a “mini-Disneyland”. Nevertheless, the Tuscan beauty and atmosphere is not absent. I walked around the first houses of the village and very soon discovered some very quiet and calm paths, ideal for getting lost in. I immediately heard the discreet and continuous sound that was “dominating” in the area. Hundreds of birds, sitting on the trees, were participating in a “concert” which is always welcome to hear to and, although cliché-d, the birds’ song is definitely enjoyable. It did not take much time before another characteristic sound was added: Church bells, a new minimalistic “orchestra” joined into the soundscape. I had no idea what was the (probably) religious reason for which the bells were ringing for, but nonetheless their sound felt like it was making a loose counterpoint with the birdsong, I was very glad I had the “Record” button already pressed down…

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Aleppo, Syria

Aleppo is a city in the north of Syria, close to the border with Turkey. I was relaxing in my hotel room when a characteristic sound of an Arabic country was heard: the chant of the muezzin, calling the faithful to pray. As in Collodi, in Italy, again, a sound of religious origin dominated. The Muslims, instead of the bells, use the human voice, which itself adds a special dimension to the ambience. Besides the interest in the chant itself (the scales, the singing technique, the language used, the reverb caused by the amplification), from the fist time I heard the muezzin, I was fascinated by the fact that his sound can be heard only in some specific countries of the world. Its rarity, for an inhabitant of a non-Muslim country, makes the listening experience even more important…

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Tags: field recording mini-series, mecha/orga, yiorgis sakellariou

[@ .Es, Thessaloniki, may 27 2009, as part of the Performance Festival, 2nd Thessaloniki Biennále]

there are few entities that have been as influential in the culturally limp city of northern greece that i call home, as Dimosioypalliliko Retire have been. Influential might be a weird word, as many people are born everyday who are either oblivious to the band’s existence, or just plain refuse to acknowledge them. Let’s just say vital instead of influential.

A brief intro to their work has been posted by nicolas in the “all noises…” blog here, so i won’t double dip in things that i don’t know first hand (i’ve only had the recordings to cherish). Equally important to their audiocentric oeuvre though, is the work of Thanasis Chondros & Alexandra Katsiani (two thirds of the band) in the art/performance space. They have been “coordinating their behaviour” since 1974 and in the time since then have made it their business to introduce performance, direct art action and public intervention in the grey and confused spaces between lives. They have also curated art spaces (“sxedia”, “alli poli” among others) presenting their own work as well as that of others’. Their acts range from simple interventions with everyday pedestrian reality, to elaborate and absurdist conceptions and, finally, flirtations with established art-forms. Objects shift meaning and function, settings are deprived of their assigned use and are given a new one to try out, question. Their tools too numerous to mention, but the character always unmistakably theirs, they shifted focus from art and towards life itself (maybe an evasive statement, given art’s original function within life, but nevertheless an inevitable one, seeing the hole that established art hads dug for itself in the past 50 or so years).

performance art can be a bitch do document & retrospectives mostly serve as obituaries more than celebrations; these were two issues that were acknowledged by the duo and/or the people who organized the tribute to their work on May 27. The second issue was simply skipped over by admitting that they themselves had put a full stop to their activities a few years ago (ending with “Yperdwthe” in march 2004) and that they didn’t really mind a eulogy. Either way, the people who met at .Es for the tribute had too much fun getting together to actually turn this into a sad affair.

As for the documentation, this was handled by a relatively comprehensive slide-show and a video-reel with fragments from past events that stimulated the imagination more than substituting presence and experience. There were history lessons to be had also, by putting these actions into their context (what we accept as art now must have seemed terribly weird back then), but history lessons are for each individual to process, so i best not water them down in this space.

there were a few extra touches to the event. amongst other speakers, Costis Drygianakis shared his thoughts on the artists and made available a more detailed text he prepared for the occasion. The artists (or ex-artists?) were in fine form too, enjoying in good spirit a borderline tasteless re-enactment of one of heir most known and affectionate performances; they were also carrying a soccer ball with them in honour of the Champion’s League finals that were taking place during the same hour. This is also a good spot to mention the fine work of the people behind the Performance Festival of the Biennále, who managed to organize a pretty interesting 10-days worth of events/actions & brought together the artists involved in a refreshing bit of cultural exchange, amongst themselves primarily and the city second.

(photos courtesy of Costis Drygianakis & Olya Gluschenko)

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a couple of links:
http://www.magnet.gr/views/allipoli/
http://www.dim-retire.com/

Tags: chondros & katsiani

a few days ago, Thanasis Chondros & Alexandra Katsiani (of Dhmosioypalliliko Retire fame) forwarded us a warning for a new virus threatening computer users around the globe. Their email (in greek) follows:

Tags: art