Like many of her Greek contemporaries, Kristi presents us with melancholy pop sung in the Greek language. Unlike many other Greek women performers, you will not find many up-tempo songs on this CD. You will find many sad laments about various kinds of loss among this ambient collection of songs. And Kristi’s sweet voice often feels like a lullaby being sung in your ears, especially on Don’t Say I Regret, leading us to a bittersweet conclusion.

An array of instruments appears on these carefully composed songs, including violin, clarinet, djembe, accordion along with more exotic instruments. While drum and percussion tracks augment Kristi’s songs, her vocals become the main focus and the instrumental tracks become a wonderful tapestry in which Kristi does embellish. Yet, despite beauty that can often be found in sad moments, Echotropiaisn’t the album for everyone. If you are looking for danceable tracks instead of introspective tracks, you will have to search elsewhere, but if you’re looking for an other worldly experience, then you will feel at home listening to this CD.

But this just goes to prove that it’s hard to tell when it comes to Balkan ethno-trance. I guess that’s not surprising, considering that Stassinopoulou made up that label for herself and there ain’t anyone else working the territory. But be not afraid; this is great stuff, even if you’ve never heard any other Greek techno folk psychedelia before. Kristi, who’s been kicking around the cool Exarthia section of Athens for more than a decade refining her attack, has found a way to remake the multi-culti nature of Greek music into some wild stuff that might spin your holy head around.

A lot of this music uses the basic underpinning of rembetica (Greek heroin-chic folk music); other stuff sounds like it comes from all countries and nowhere simultaneously. But all of it features Stassinopoulou’s haunting vocals and a dense layer of sounds both electronic and live. Echotropia, which was released to great acclaim in Europe in 1999, is finally out here, and it is pretty clearly some of the best music of any kind that you’re likely to hear if you can put down that damned Creed disc.

Stassinopoulou and her co-conspirator Stathis Kalyviotis both have a sense that this is a huge wild world full of lots of different cool stuff, so they just throw it all in. Kickin’ tracks like “We Are Flying,” featuring a great surprising bagpipe-sounding break at the 3:59 mark, and “Drumming Frogs,” which has a great vocal line, some smooth chanting, and an unavoidable accordion melody over bubbling computer rhythms, definitely escape the “boring world music” axis. And when they do the inevitable woman-whispering-text-into-one-speaker track, at least the text is from Mikhail Bulgakov’s superb novel The Master and Margarita.

Listen: you might not like this music, especially if you’re a bad boring person who is just taking up space on this planet. But you’ll probably love it.

Matt Cibula

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