eektrope

picasaweb took the liberty of google-translating a writing under one of my hosted photos, and it went gloriously like.. exactly like "...hangout on the beach near the port - and many do not swim ekeipera - and to wash and saw two horses there (fraction mints .. because the horse was a little fright and went back and forth - with the difficulty of controlling them kavalarides)..."

didn't that sound curiously funnily clumsily poetic? perhaps i won't have to spend time writing senseless stuff for these here posts and employ google-translator on random text..




anyway, the main thing (that should make sense) that i wanted to say is that i discovered another feature article line in pitchfork.com, called "guest lists":



- where they call some of their favourite (and hot) artists, one per week, or so, and ask them a dozen questions, about their favorite modern music at the moment, the book they liked most lately etc. etc. - and actually it's a good good source of gathering and poking at curious stuff - i mean.. maybe it's all a part of the trendsetting.. for example many artists there like say that their fav band lately are these and these, who are actually good mates of ours.. but anyway.. why not?

artists..
anyway.

so one of the first things i stumbled upon (apart from the fact that Zola Jesus (should i say that the name feels campy as hell :P) adores reading Philip K. Dick) is that one of OMD members (McClu..something - sorry i forget [such] a name) talked and talked about his preference of Robyn.. (me, i adore Robyn's "Cobrastyle", its gorgeous hipness (and hip-hopness, r'n'b-style rap etc.) and specifically Bloody Beetroots' remix which is much more dirty, punchy and dark - it actually blows up my mind!!!!)

so here's today's back 2 back thing. could never be more proper, although maybe musically two clips don't quite fit into each other (mostly due to the fact that putting this particular Kate's song near something else is like breaking some sacrament - it's really much more complex and deep then Robyn's take on "mine/not mine"), but i personally find many influences of Kate in Robyn's style anyway.


whatever.

they come in three's #2 almost

was listening to bel canto again today, somehow. if i could find all the pieces, i would make it one of "they come in three's" posts, but i'm not sure if i can. anyway, this bel canto's agassiz piece is.. it reminds me so much of something natively and naturally greek, or, at least, balkan, should i say? not sure which is which. but it made me search among Hatzidakis tracks I have - i didn't find something very much close to bel canto's piece, but i don't know - maybe you can understand what these pieces have in common.. maybe.. or well, i remembered some Kyriakos Sfetsas' tracks from the soundtrack of that intense and memorable "Paraggelia" movie. i can't quite identify why. maybe you can't too :) and i am at a loss here.



(i don't know for how much the above video will stay online, because it was identified as copyrighted) but well, anyway, bel canto are from somewhere in Scandinavia, i think, and they are kind of.. like Dead Can Dance, with those neo-classical/new-age/ethnic elements, but with more cheer and playfulness at times. yeah, i'd say they are less sombre, and that's why i like them, perhaps, but again, maybe not. agassiz reminded me of ubiqutous Cantara, Dead Can Dance's staple on-the-forehead piece - the second part of it

another piece i remembered was the one we heard on the 11th Jazz Festival in Technopolis, Athens, Greece, by some guys called Nils Berg Cinemascope (or a guy called Nils Berg, obviously) who employed some videos from youtube, allegedly, having cut, hacked and remixed them (both sound and video) - and playing along on sax (er, some kind of clarinet as a friend corrected me), contrabass and drums. actually they were interesting, and the last piece featured santouri (on video) - and it was such a delightful tune, and the video was edited in such a delightful way that you couldn't.. :) help smiling and watching and clapping in the end etc. - but i still can't find it on youtube. so be it...

another thing i remembered... is Hood's "Rural colours" and iLiKETRAiNS' "A rook house for Bobby" will be into my top 5 indie/alt/rather moody pieces with killer intense endings, if i were to make one (remembering High Fidelity :P)

hip hop

it's like fifteen minutes now that i put myself to determine why exactly i can't get to grips with that Fujiya & Miyagi "knickerbocker" song. i mean. hell. i can't say that i really hate it. or that, as the greek saying goes, βγάζει μαλλιά η γλώσσα μου. but it's surely in the category of those songs many people seem to like, and i am at a loss to understand why exactly :P so here it goes, probably i found a reason. huh, well, who said we shouldn't overanalyze and think about things [a lot]? therefore, it's not really the song that is at fault, but its hipness, its pretty, sexy nonsense, whispered sexily again and again... and i don't know what else which lead to.. myself having those stupid words in my mind, vanilla, strawb'erry (yeeees, with the stress on the wrong syllable, which - now that i think about, makes it neither English, nor French :P), nickerbokerglory.. baaaaad, bad song. hip video :P

no, these are nits, but i don't know, i somehow remembered them. no, not because of ultimate non-hipness (probably they just were unlucky - as you never know when you become hip) - but because of this particular picture, which in the end of the day doesn't bear VERY BIG resemblance to the above shoot. but anyway :P just remembered it.

and well, i remembered knickerbocker in the first place because i fell by chance upon this song, by another band - which is SO much alike, in the way they sing this nonsense. but well, it's not 'bout knickers, vanilla strawberry whatever, but about sabrina - aspirina (WTF? :P) and ok, there's not just male sexy whisper, but male - female thing, which adds another measure of nonsense (because the two voices say different things, one reciting days of week (i think), the other telling stuff about aspirina) anyway. i like this one more. heh, maybe because it's not unjustly hip in my world, YET.



well. i should analyze all that. think about.. kind of.. what's my kraken problem? :P anyway.
and it was a nice day. did some work, had some inspiration, started to listen to some music, my interest gradually shifting more and more into the daydreaming phase. SO. ok. gone to do some wrok.

come in three's

i don't know exactly why, but these three pieces go together (they just went) in my mind. the first reminds me very much of musical experiments of those musique concrete pioneers, those who did first ever sampling etc. by cutting and splicing and sticking back together tapes, acquiring that peculiar theatrical and maybe otherworldly mystical effect. the following somehow, structurally, i think, is build on the same philosophy of sampling to gain an atmospheric theatrical effect, rather than something musically beautiful (which happens anyway).. i somehow love this piece, with warm naive wording like "uncle albert plays the sax" ending abruptly, as if disappearing from the picture, and then appearing again, and that slightly detuned yellowish piano melody.. and that notorious french accent the majority of people find attractive makes "sax" sound like "sex", and "destruction" like "stretching", and you end up thinking that a song that makes reference to world war II (at least as far sax and destruction take you..), is about having a good time, i.e. having sex and streching :P (irrelevant, anyway)



which reminded me of the following - can't explain exactly why - there's the same note somewhere lingering, and the same disconnected voice sampling, but slightly darker (makes me think of resignation rather than soft nostalgia of the previous piece)



and finally this.. which is bouncy and not like the previous two pieces, but somehow the words that are said somewhere in between, towards the end, glue in with the rest of my thoughts and my feelings

chance

prin apo merikes meres...

mou irthe mia eikona apo, it seems, recurrent dream - mia geitonia pou den thn kserw, mia stroggylh plateia apo thn opoia pernaei ena leoforeio, h trigwnikh plateia.. lefkes, psyla dentra, neoklassikh arxitektonikh, kitrinwpa kthria me psila parathyra

was thinking about different mutilating mutations of my surname, thought of "zhekav" - isn't it slightly aramaic, heh? also reminds me of russian words like "zek", which refers to an imprisoned person, or a person who has spent several times in prison, and "zhek" which is an abbreviation of the committee that handles the affairs of a large apartment block, or blocks.

blowfish stomp rogueness. outright nonsense.

akolouthei skinh apo tainia.

perigrafei ton eayto tou san mia dixasmenh prosopikothta (laughs in background)
re malaka, kai poios se exei dixasei paidi mou?
(a muffled answer heard from somewhere)
(more laughs)
the usual setting.
now a different setting.
grime.
plot subdued.
malady.