Yiorgis Sakellariou - Nympholepsy
Avant Music News
Mon Jan 27 13:02:06 GMT 2020
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The voice of Savina Yannatou babbles and subdivides, spreading rapidly from the centre to the edges, becoming a palpitating flock of sharp inhales and tumbling tongues. One definition of nympholepsy is “divine frenzy”, used by the ancient Greeks describe the state triggered when someone is possessed by the nymphs. With Yannatou’s voice as source material, Yiorgis Sakellariou enacts this condition of rapture: spasms of incantatory speech, words fracturing into illusory reflections and responses, the breathlessness of a body under supernatural siege. Yet it also depicts the blur of myth, ancient history and the divine through which this condition is manifest. As Yannatou’s vocalisations melt from shapely syllables to the howls of open vowels, I hear a smudging of the boundaries between forms and worlds. Just as the state of nympholepsy incites the muddling of bodily autonomy and divine influence, so history becomes a portal to the inseparable whirl of fact and fantastical conjecture.
Aptly, the narrative of Nympholepsy is akin to the unfolding of distant memory. Spaces melt into eachother as walls curve round to become floors. Voices arc like rainbows and then fall to become fogs. Some of the field recordings woven into the composition (the scrape of rusted metal, the rustle of dry leaves) are rendered in sparkling fidelity, while others feel vague and phantom-like, their particulars spilled somewhen upon the cobbled pathway of time. At certain points, transitions are rendered like spectacular cinematographic edits, like when a chorus of hydraulic water jets suddenly vanish into the crackle of a dying fire. Yannatou slinks in and out of the frame throughout, sometimes condensed into human form, elsewhere dispersed like crepuscular dawnlight. Throughout, Nympholepsy manifests as a demonstration of Sakellariou’s magnificent and cruel capacity to build spaces that are rich enough to feel inhabitable, only to augment and obliterate them in a manner that casts doubt on all material solidity.
Wed Mar 18 19:50:18 GMT 2020The Free Jazz Collective 80
History can very often be a burden. Your past comes back to haunt you, to remember the great John Fahey. Living in Greece there are two realities you have to endure. First is the narrative of the Greek state. The Greek authorities are eager and willing to sell the classical times any way they can. Everything else becomes a blur, just a note in history’s long trajectory. The mainstream needs the “democracy of ancient Athens” and all that comes along with it. Secondly, it is a matter of scale. Everything is measured up by the size. Numbers, buildings, antiquities. Having worked, very lately, in the field of tourism, all the people coming to Greece get the idea that only kings, queens and people of the upper classes existed here. There’s no reference of everyday life and its people, the images, the sounds, the boring normality and the burdens of it maybe. Many times some very beautiful and important sites seem totally empty in any meaning, if you ignore the real people that lived there, touched the marbles, changed and determined the landscape.
This site specific recording came into my attention during my own personal procedure of reassessing my past to continue into the future. It is inspired by the history and the immediate environment of ancient Messene. In the liner notes you will find the key to Nympholepsy, which is the link between the sound of now and the materials which date many centuries ago. Like music is a non verbal language, Nympholepsy provides a bridge, a communiqué maybe, between the present and past. But who is to say that time is linear? And why do we measure everything, so obsessed, by time? Nympholepsy stays in the middle, not wanting to give definite answers.
Nympholepsy uses the voice of Savina Yannatou as a core material manipulated and combined with site- specific field recordings. Yannatou is a well known greek singer, one of the very few with strong ties with the greek folk tradition and European improvisation as well. This fact in a country that music tradition is a do not touch affair is really difficult. The cd only last for 23 minutes. I caught myself wanting to hear more. Sakellariou, apart from the personal nature of this recording, seems to understand really well the balance needed. Nympholepsy could very easily be an audio guide to the ancient Messene site. It walks with you, reveals the audio qualities, hidden voices, current noises of the site. Guides you even. It has the relaxed vibe of someone (not a tourist in a hurry to see as much as possible) who is willing to integrate and, at the same time, the intensity the weight the past (glory days, days of happiness and disasters) carries for any place.
This site-specific recording was presented at an event produced by Onassis Cultural Center in 2018 and even though I hate the way they patronize modern culture in Greece, OCC is one of the very few that tries to present a different non-mainstream side of modern Greece. Not everything is just black or just white it seems.
@koultouranafigo