“We were one of the very first bands that dared include a traditional song in their album to not have stones thrown at us for this”. Kristi Stassinopoulou and Stathis Kalyviotis, No 1 for months on the World Music Charts Europe with their new Riverboat album Greekadelia, are in my kitchen remembering the time when it started to become less physically hazardous to play folk music in Greece. It’s not that the music was bad, but that traditional songs were used by the junta to stoke up nationalistic fervour, presumambly inviting stone throwing by those of a leftish presuasion. But if the music contained modern elements, perhaps involving electricity,then the stone chucking would also hail from those on the right. Either way, it didn’t look good for musicians.

Stassinopoulou and Kalyviotis were shining lights in a movement afoot in the early ’90s to reclaim folk music for the young, for hte left. Although they had met at the fag-end of hte ’80s, this time really marked the start of her and Kalyviotis’ missile free, folk-rooted and prodigious musical collaboration.

And now Greekadelia comes stuffed full of gems of Greek traditional songs performed in a the couple’s immitable style. It marks a change for them, not just because the recordings are not of their own compositions; they are the result of the pair working together as a duo and a move away from the bigger band sound that has typified their output for many years.

It was a change in part inspired by their appearance at London’s Roundhouse for fRoots’ 30th birthday bash. Busy recording a new album around that time, the pair were bringing in all the friends and musicians they normally worked with, but with a mounting sense of unease. it was sounding all too familiar. “No, we are tired of this,” they said. “In our free time,” Stassinopoulou tells me, we just play folk songs. Stathis practices the lute by playing old folk songs, and I practice the bendir by playing along with recordings of the old tunes. That’s our musical practice but also our joy. We also do it on the beach or when we go camping; we have the lute and the bendir.”

True to form, they had instruments with them on a trip to London which coincided with the fRoots party, and agreed to do an impromptu guest spot when invited. “We did one song, but were very, very uncertain that we should do this in the middle of these huge bands that were performing in this huge place wherre we had never been before. We said OK, let’s do it for Ian because he’s a friend, and when we did, everybody said, ‘Ah, that’s so nice. Why don’t you record something like this?’”

And so, on returning to Greece, they both threw themselves into extensive research, unearthing songs from the rural areas of the Greek mainland and its islands. The prodigious archive of enthomusicologist and folk singer Domna Samiou proved a valuable source of information and Stassinopoulou acknowleges that without her work, many songs would have been lost. A student of the conservative musicologist and Byzantine music scholar Simon Karas, Samiou (wose death this year aged 82 sparked national mourning) was hugely influential in Greece as a singer and teacher, working tirelessly like Karas to preserve the old traditions.

Her thorough conservatism, though not as strickt as her mentor’s was softened through her work with the man generally referred to as ‘the Greek Dylan’, singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos. Inspired by Fairport Convention and of course Dylan himself, Dionysis was the first Greek musician “to combine a rock band with traditional instruments and traditional rhythms”. Inviting Samiou to sing with him, he introduced her to the burgeoning underground alternative audience emerging through the Athens club scene in the mid ’70s, directly after the fall of the junta. This began to popularise traditional music amongst the left-inclined young, starting the long slog of wrenching the music away from its purely right-wing associations.

Sadly this proved a false dawn for an attempt on the music’s de-politicisation as the movement was suppressed immediately, not to re-emerge for another 20 years – at the time when Kalyviotis and Stassinopoulou happily discovered that playing traditional music was not an excuse for a stoning.

When musicians turn to the traditional songs of their homeland, as these two are doing, it’s easy to assume their musical activities are fuelled by looking back in search of their roots. Kalyviotis is having none of it.

“Speaking for myself it was never ‘back to’ anything. I grew up with the music of the city, with rock, with funk. For me ‘traditional’ was something that I discovered in my 20s. Nobody in my circle knew about it. It was something new. It wasn’t a need to ‘go back’ to anything. I remember I was about 15 years old and I was listening to punk music in the year 1980. I have an uncle who is from Pontus and we went to his house and he put on music from Pontus. It had a very strong beat. I heard it and I said ‘Oh my god, this is punk rock!’ So for me it was new. Anyway I don’t like to speak about the past, all things like this. I don’t like it.”

Stassinopoulou also grew up with rock and funk and the music of the city: like Kalyviotis she was brought up in Athens. Before forming the ‘garage rock’-inspired band Selana with him, she enjoyed an illustrious stint as Mary Magdalene in the original Greek production of Jesus Christ Superstar in the late ’70s, and in 1983 was the Greek candidate in the Eurovision Song Contest. A stretch in Evita followed. (Her earlier story, in a 2003 interview from fR237, can be found on the fRoots web site.)

Unlike their personal relationship, Selana was fairly short-lived as Kalyviotis and Stassinopoulou decided to work together on her solo albums, typically featuring his musical arrangements set to her lyrics, and down the years various combinations of musical friends and collaborators forming her band.

For Stassinopoulou the relationship with traditional music is not so clear-cut as her partner’s. “For me,” she says, valiantly drinking the coffee I’ve made, “although I grew up in the city there are memories of these songs apart from just rediscovering them. I was not into them, but I had the memories of the songs.”

As a child she would spend time with her parents in her father’s native Pelopponese and remembers singing the more famous folk songs on the car journey taking them there. Her parents were not unenthusiastic members of the church and services there inspired Stassinopoulou’s love of the Byzantine music that Karas documented so thoroughly. She explains that he was the first to say that Greek folk music of the rural areas is a direct extension of Byzantine church music. Now, she says, course it’s the same music. It’s not that it derived from the church. It’s the church who took the ancient existing scales and the modes, maqams like they say in Arabic or ragas as they say in India or troparia in Byzantine, and they used them in church so as to make the church music popular and get people to turn to religion. I’m talking about the scales, rather than the traditional rhythms because there was no rhythm in Byzantine music.”

Perhaps this was down to the fact that the rhythms in traditional folk music are hard-wired for dancing. Kalyviotis believes that “It’s something you have to be Greek to feel, because first of all, the rhythms are not the usual rhythms that you have in Western music that use a four, most of the songs are 7/8 or 9/8 or 5/8, which for us it was very easy because it’s…” “It’s like our DNA,” Stassinopoulou interjects. “For me the 7/8 is like DNA.”

A multi-cultural DNA, as she says: “One very important aspect of Greece is that we are situated between the borders of three continents. Greece is not Europe only, it’s not Asia only, it’s not Africa only it’s all of these. And this is the big virtue of the music and the culture, and also the big problem sometimes because we have to find an identity and decide. I don’t think that people should decide where they belong: this is a little bit black and white, which I never liked in my life. But the thing is that we are in between these cultures and therefore so is the music.”

“You have a lot of different styles and rhythms and scales that pre-date Byzantine times, even the writing of the notes in Byzantine music goes back to two or three specific inscriptions of hymns for the god Apollo, using the same scales and notation.”

The history of movement, people, ideas and cultures embedded in their musical discoveries inspires both Kalyviotis and Stassinopoulou. As does the idea that folk dance brings people together, whatever their personal beliefs. Dancing around to an iPod, she says “can no way be compared with the experience of dancing when people are holding their hands and they are in a circle, and suddenly there is one breath coming out of all this circle, one speed, one meditative kind of union and physical body type of connection. Every Wednesday evening people that we don’t know come from all areas of Athens and we have this dance. Suddenly you hold the hand of someone who may be something very hostile to you or something very, very, different from what you are. This you only discover when you’ve finished. Suddenly you find out, oh my god, I have nothing to do with these people. Or, with this guy, yes he has the same beliefs, as me, the same attitude of life. It makes no difference while you dance. You are connected. You are one with all of them. It is a kind of being on the earth feeling, to be able to connect yourself with all the alternatives.”

Presumably this feeling was why the Colonels found that tying traditional music and dance to their cause was so useful. But for Stassinopoulou, discovering that she was moved in the same way by folk, church music and the songs of the Velvet Underground, the political associations grated. They formed barriers that she wants to see abolished.

Yet she is not naive about the implications of traditional music, pointing to one reason as to why it’s been a source of shame. She tells me about Kato Sta Dasia Platania, sometimes known as Diamandoula: “I feel this song was hidden because it’s speaking of a strange story that must have happened in the rural areas in the village areas last century. There was a rape of a girl. It’s very sad. Talking about the past and all these things is not always positive. The nature of Greek life in the rural areas has been very tough and very conservative and very bad.”

Kato Sta Dasia Platania features on Greekadelia with other rare songs from specific places. The not so rare also get a look in. Halassia Mou popularised in the ’50s is now so famous, says Stassinopoulou, that it can no longer be considered local. But whatever their provenance, all the songs on the album benefit not just from Kalyviotis’s multi-instrumental virtuosity but his brilliance with new technology.

Using tape loops and found sound, he captures the atmosphere of the songs and the sounds of the traditional instruments. He eschews the depressingly popular use of electric guitars to mimic clarinet solos which only ever makes the songs louder and kitsch (though not in a good way). Both Kalyviotis and Stassinopoulou, whilst keen to show respect for the songs, are not of the view that it’s particularly useful to try and perform the music in the way that it was played centuries ago: pointless, in fact, thinks Stassinopoulou, given that no-one now can really know how it was played then anyway.

But whilst the music is given a modern twist, the poetry of the old lyrics is as moving and relevant today as when it was written. The writing style attracts Kalyviotis, he says, because it’s a poetry that only people that are close to nature can display. For Stassinopoulou it brings back childhood emotion.

“Neratzoula, whenever I listened to it it used to be very famous Greek song I would cry. It’s the Words of it combined with the melody. Neratzoula is a nickname and it means the bitter orange tree, but it’s also a female name so, ‘Neratzoula full of leaves, where did your flowers go? Where did your beauty go?’ and Neratzoula is answering ‘the North Wind blew and took it all away.’p>

The songs transport her back to favourite scenes, such as tiny white chapels seen from the sea, dotting the islands as they perch in the cliffs. For her, the words are returning to natural things, taking care of what nature is telling you. They bring me close to something that is getting lost, something unique.” And she is notjust talking personally.

“It seems to me,” remarks Kalyviotis “that at least one of the songs, Me Galsan Ta Poulia The Birds, They Fooled Me, reflects what’s happening now in Greece. It says that the birds they fooled me, they said I’d never die. Sol build a big house and from one of the windows I see all the valley, and from there I see Death coming. So for me it’s a representation of all that is happening now in Greece, and maybe the next step in what we are calling development of the western world

Life in Athens now, they tell me, “is indeed very rocky, very heavy, the last years like a dark, black cloud and it’s difficult to get to the truth of what’s going on.” The depression and anger and feeling of no-hope swirling around them have sharpened their focus on music. They want to spread a little joy. Although the recent gig season was one of the poorest they’ve ever endured, one of the good things to come out of the crisis, they say, is the work that musicians are now producing.

“Until now, many good musicians were playing with big names in big commercial clubs which nowadays have serious problems,” says Kalyviotis. “It’s where the big money went, so they are out of work and this has led to the creation of new groups and they have started again to play clubs. And I believe that this will create something good.”

“Just to describe a little better what he’s saying,” interjects his partner, “if you would tell someone in the street ‘I am a musician,’ he would say ‘Where? In which club?’ And if you say ‘Not in these, in the others,’ nobody even knew the ones that we have been playing. They were more specifically for young and for alternative people. Now there is a return to them because all these big places are collapsing economically. You have good musicians that, in order to make a living, were obliged to go and work there, playing something like Turbo-Folk. Now you have them making different kinds of music and being able to dedicate themselves to smaller groups etc. This is what you were saying, Stathis? I don’t want to interfere, just to make it clear…” She pauses. “Though even these small clubs, it’s hard to have a real audience like we used to have some years ago. They were small clubs, but filled with people. Now if you have 30 or 40 people in a small club it’s considered a big success. Everybody’s trying to minimise the ticket prices etc because people have no money;, sometimes we’re paid just ten Euros.”

Stassinopoulou and Kalyviotis are still in a minority of musicians who sing in Greek. Whilst there are schools nowr which specialise in Greek traditional music, the majority of young musicians there want to learn jazz or sing in rock and pop bands in English. it’s a hangover from the ’60s and ’70s, when that music underground in Greece held connotations of openness and free love and for a long time was banned on Greek radio, ramping up its attractiveness. It’s a source of frustration for Stassinopoulou. “Among the kids of our friends, the mainstream music they listen to which is considered very alternative is imported music only, music which is with an electric guitar, with drums and bass or even more modern and more interesting types of music like hip hop. Things that have not been born in our country. The main thing for me is the language. I mean you cannot be singing about your love affair and writing lyrics about your beloved and express yourself in English (it you are not). It’s impossible. You’re just a monkey.”

Stassinopoulou and Kalyviotis though, have still managed to build up a solid, sizeable and dedicated young audience in Greece through the years, and now to their delight they are gaining older fans previously deterred by their ‘alternative’ reputation. After giving a demo of Greekadelia to their friend Yannis, he called to say his mother had heard it. “She came to me crying: ‘these are the songs that I was singing in my village. I am so moved to hear this. What is this? You Iisten to the same songs that I grew up with?’ And he replied ‘Yes, it’s my friends. It’s Kristi and Stathis.’ ‘Oh,’ said his mum, ‘Tell them congratulations. This is so nice what they are doing.”

For Stassinopoulou and Kalyviotis, this “was the most moving thing. it was the thing that made us say ‘OK let’s go on with this,’ because we were wondering whether we should or shouldn’t go on with this album.” Funnily enough they experienced similar doubt when working on their other World Music Chart Europe N0 1 album, 2002′s The Secrets Of The Rocks. For that particular release seeing the light of day we have to thank their farsighted friend and early manager Thalia lakovidou, who sadly died in 2004.

Now for their latest album we should be grateful to Yannis’s mum who also told him: “They’re doing what they should be doing to make young people go back to these songs.” It’s what Stassinopouiou and Kalyviotis are aiming for. And if their modern take on the old songs can show people that singing in their own language does not necessarily indicate rabid right-wing conservatism, then Greekadelia is really a freedom cry for Greek folk music. And it makes you dance!

Elisabeth Kinder

“I do feel that with our albums and with our live concerts out there, we are opening a window of communication and respect for our country.”

Restless artists Kristi Stassinopoulou and Stathis Kalyviotis have been shaking up the world music landscape for quite some time now and every new album is a revelation. This time instead of composing their own music, they reinvented Greek folk songs. They are currently on tour in Europe presenting their latest album Greekadelia (Riverboat Records, World Music Network, 2012). Greekadelia with its mesmerizing soundscapes has topped the world music charts and has received numerous positive reviews. ελculture spoke with Kristi Stassinopoulou about the tour, inspiration, the way their music is received and their potential future plans.

ελc: Currently you’re on tour mainly in Europe. How has the audience abroad received your music and what are their comments about it?

Kristi: Stathis and me, we just returned from a tour in BeNeLux and in Denmark feeling happy and fulfilled by the very warm response of the local audiences everywhere we played.

It’s been more than a decade now that our music has been drawing attention from outside of Greece. We’ve been honoured by very good reviews from the international media, frequent airplay of our songs, and top positions of our albums in the world music radio charts. So as a result we have been touring all over the world together with our band for many years.

This last year we are mainly presenting our latest album titled “Greekadelia”, which for the first time is not including songs of our own, but arrangements of Greek demotika, folk songs from different rural areas of our country. And we are happy to have found out that the audience very much likes the way we are presenting these folk songs, using this peculiar mixture of traditional acoustic instruments, like the laouto and the frame-drum percussions, together with my Indian harmonium and with Stathis Kalyviotis live looping on them in a most genuine and impressive way.

In between the songs I often do short narrations that help the foreign listeners dive deeper into the atmosphere of the era and of the area of Greece where each of these songs was born and sung for centuries. People always come after the concert to tell me how much they enjoy this. Then as the concert goes on and things get warmer, we often like to expand the songs and go into electronic and vocal improvisations and that is when people are usually starting to also move and dance and get… Greekadelized!

ελc: How easy or difficult is it every time you set out for a new album? Is inspiration coming from within or do you draw inspiration from people/ situations/places surrounding you?

Kristi: From within, from without… inspiration is there all the time, is everywhere, apparent and shining like a bright sun, or secret and hidden and then suddenly appearing, like a new moon. Inspiration is there when travelling, when meditating, when struggling to survive, when driving your car in the traffic jam of a big city, or when listening to the waves of the sea from within your sleeping bag on a faraway beach, when in love, when in a yoga asana, when washing the dishes with the pouring water producing all those peculiar sounds on the metal surfaces… Everything can be a source of inspiration, if the mind is constantly alert and ready to receive it.

ελc: Your latest album went really well and its reception internationally is uplifting. Does this fuel you with more energy? Do you feel that your music reaches out to more people and cultures?

Kristi: Yes, all these feelings are indeed arising inside me… and of course they do enforce the inner motivation to go deeper into music, into creating and into communicating with other humans. But then also, few things are actually changing in the deeper substance of my real life…

ελc: Do you feel that your music artistry is a window to Greek culture-traditional and contemporary -especially now that Greece is on the spotlight because of the crisis? Is art a way to export a feel good impression about Greece?

Kristi: Yes, I do feel that with our albums and with our live concerts out there, we are opening a window of communication and respect for our country. Wherever we find ourselves in the world we are receiving big interest and sympathy for Greece and for its people, which is very moving. Through our music and in our concerts, people are receiving a nice and positive “breeze” from Greece, which, believe me, is sometimes a very hard work to do… Because all of this, we are accomplishing it all by ourselves, without any help of any kind from any Greek organization ever.

I agree with you and I keep saying to everybody, that Greece should stop relying only on it’s ancient achievements and look a bit forward and start to support and present also it’s contemporary culture and not only it’s ancient “marbles”.

ελc: Tell us a bit more about your upcoming tour dates in Greece and abroad. For example, Benelux is always among your tour stops, it seems like you’ve established an audience there. On the other hand, in a recent interview for the Swedish magazine LIRA, you mentioned you have never performed in Sweden so the concert in Gothenburg will be your first one in Sweden. How excited are you to play for a new audience?

Kristi: It is always exciting to be visiting a new country to play your music. The relationship that is being created between the artist and the audience during the live performances is an important and deep relationship. In each and every honest performance the artist gets “undressed” in front of the eyes of the listeners, but also the listeners are becoming transparent to the eyes of the artist. Through the eyes and through the body language of the people I am somehow “catching” the soul of each listener, of each audience, the vibe of each different city, each different country. I feel that I am learning a lot about the people through this temporary but strong relationship that is being created during a concert. This is what I mostly enjoy in this interesting on-the-road adventure, which I don’t like to see as a “career”, but mostly as a collection of experiences and friendships.

Now speaking about Scandinavia… Partly because of its magical long days and nights, partly because of its history and its ancient pagan religions, for me it is one of the mythical areas of the world, that I very much like to get to know and explore as a touring artist.

ελc: Given the fact that Greek folk music is inexhaustible what are your plans for the future? Do you want to keep busy on the same artistic form for the foreseeable future or would you like to explore something different?

Kristi : I don’t like to make plans that have to do with my creativity. I prefer to let things go with the flow in this ocean of vibrations called music… There are many different ideas and wishes in my heart about future creations and it is often difficult to me and to Stathis to decide what we continue and what we leave aside… So we let it come and reach us by itself and this, at least until now, has been working well for us.

Written by: Ioanna Svana

Published on ελculture.gr

STATHIS: We have to go back in…1989 …

KRISTI: In that legendary rock club called AN in the area of Exarhia in Athens…

STATHIS: …Together with two other musicians we created a garage-punk-rembetiko-traditional band. We played like that for around two years. The Greek-rock audience and critics were shocked by our sound, we had a small but “fanatic” audience, we played in some of the most underground Greek clubs and festivals of that time, but nobody dared to release our recordings. Our ideology was -and still is- that something very important was lost in modern Greek music. That feeling that we were getting when listening to old recordings was not there anymore. Overproduced, too “clean”, too “sterilized” sounds coming out of modern equipment and studios, modern arrangements and the feeling that the only think that was different in this huge “Vangelis”- want-to-be sound, was just the voice of the singer. Since the time we met with Kristi until now we have created dozens of bands, played in hundreds of clubs and festivals in Greece and abroad and made 5 CDs with international appeal. This international appeal was something that really took us by surprise. It was the last think we ever expected, especially because we were always singing in Greek. The Greekadelia sound came out the last two years, by just the two of us playing, while waiting for hours for the band members to appear in our rehearsals! When we were invited to participate in the anniversary concert for the 30 years of Folk Roots magazine in London, we went there for the first time as a duet. It was one of those rare “magic” moments and since then we go on like this. In the Greekadelia recordings we had a “less is more” ideology. We recorded the CD playing together and working with a 21st century computer, but instead of using the hundreds of channels available, we wanted to use it like as if we had an 8 track channel studio of the 60s-70s.

KRISTI: This is our first album with just the two of us as playing as a duet. Using the live looping technique Stathis is creating this psychedelic but with a traditional texture “wall of sound”. Greekadelia is also our first album that does not include songs written by us, but only arrangements of traditional folk songs from all the different rural areas of Greece.

How did you come up with the name of the album? What does it mean to you?

KRISTI : The name of the album was taken from that phrase that Ian Anderson of fRoots magazine had written to describe our previous album “Taxidoscopio”, “Traveling tales from the greekadelic queen”, he had written. We very much liked the term greekadelic so out of it came the word Greekadelia, very well describing what we feel our music is all about: focusing on the psychedelic, the trance element of our musical folk tradition.

The album starts with the sound of a boat and the voice of a captain. What role does the fact that Greece is a nation of Islands play in how its music sounds? Does the music of the mainland differ much from the one from the far away islands? Could you tell me a bit about the background of that song (“Matia san kai ta dika sou”)?

KRISTI: These are the harsh, distorted voices of the captain, coming out from the damaged speakers of these old-type ferry boats, announcing the name of each port and giving directions to the sailors. While sleeping in our warm sleeping bags on the decks of such old boats, Stathis would wake up in each and every port, turn on his small tape-recorder and record these announcements. I feel happy that we somehow have saved them, by adding them to the background of this song. Because nowadays they have all been replaced by pre-recorded, gentle, female voices speaking very correct English, like the ones you can hear in all airports, train stations etc, all over the world.

STATHIS: Greece is a small country full of islands and big mountains. This nature makes contact difficult sometimes and big differences exist between areas of the same country. Until even 30 years ago it was really very difficult to travel from one village or one island to the other. Electricity, telephone and roads were often a luxury and there were areas of Greece which gave you the feeling that you were in the Neolithic era. This has led to the creation of completely different traditional music styles: music of the islands and Crete, music of Roumeli, music of Epirus and music of Macedonia-Thrace. And also, Greeks that were living for thousands of years in Asia Minor, in the Black sea, in Egypt, etc. came back to Greece as refugees during the big ethnic cleansing in the beginning of the 20th century, and brought their own traditions and music like Pontiaka, Smyrneika etc. What is common in all of Greek traditional music is the use of Byzantine (east roman empire) music scales.

KRISTI :The songs of the islands differ from the mainland songs of Greece in that their music is based mainly on scales that include halftones and sound more eastern, more “oriental”. The mainland songs, are based on more, let’s call them, western, pentatonic scales, in which halftones are not used and therefore end up sounding harsher. Island music is also lighter in terms of rhythm. Because island dances were born nearby the sea, they have to do with the movement of the waves and of the wind. Whereas the rhythms and dances of the mainland of Greece have to do with the heavy vibrations of the earth, the mountains, the large trees etc.

The whole album is like a musical island hopping – what part of Greece do you yourselves originate from, and how do you think the place you grew up in has influenced you in your music?

KRISTI: We both grew up in the center of Athens. My family was religious so my first hearings as a child among others were also the Byzantine hymns of the Greek Orthodox church. As a child I often had the chance to be unconsciously listening to… world music, before this term even existed. Because of that hand-made radio receiver that my elder brother, a university professor of electronics nowadays, kept scratching all through the summer nights in our children’s room on the top roof of my father’s hotel in Kalamata in the south of Peloponnesus. Right in front of the Messinean bay facing the Mediterranean sea, radio-waves were easily transformed and we would often listen to the voice of Oum Kalthoum, the music of the Jajoukas, of Balkan female choirs, of Turkish classical orchestras, without yet knowing these names, or even which side of the world all these sounds were coming from. That was of course the pre-internet era, when music from around the world was not easily accessible and all those hearings sounded more magical to our ears than nowadays. The soundtrack of those Kalamata summer nights did very much influence my taste and my curiosity about different existing types of music. Then there came the hippy era,with all those colorful tourists dropping by our hotel in Kalamata on their way to the southern Mani peninsula. I very much liked their “scratchy rock n roll guitars”… and their free manners. So I started to try to find and listen to all those legendary psychedelic rock albums of the era, which very much influenced my tastes in music and in life.

STATHIS: I grew up in the neighborhood of Plaka. Plaka, because of Acropolis, was and still is the first place to be visited by all people coming in Athens from Greece and from abroad. Until the early 80s this was a place full off all kinds of music and I was always really enjoying the accidental mixture of bouzoukis, electric guitars, Greek folk clarinets etc that were played simultaneously in different clubs and their sounds were coming through my window.

You’ve made your interpretations of old demotika songs – is that a musical tradition that is alive and well or how is its status in today’s Greece? Have you come across any critisism from ”purists” who want the old songs to sound the same as always?

STATHIS: The demotika music scene is an active scene in Greece. It is completely ignored by big record companies, TV channels and radios of the big cities. But if you visit those rural areas where they come from, there is always a panygiri (fiesta) nearby and hundreds of people of all generations dancing for hours with that music. What surprised me was that all the elder traditional players who hear us playing this music in our own way are always coming to tell us how much they like and enjoy it. Strictly speaking, we are not traditional folk musicians. You have to be born in a place to be able to have “that” magic thing, the shape of the mountains, or of the seagulls flying above the sea, coming out of your playing. Unfortunately it is impossible for me to do this, so I presume that there may be a criticism from “purists”.

KRISTI: Music and the way music is played, will always be developing and changing with time. And no one can really say that what we nowadays call traditional sound, was sounding the same when played centuries ago, especially before the recording technique was invented. Many new instruments, like for example the clarinet, the violin, etc, intruded in our traditional music the very last centuries. Tradition is and should be something alive. What moves me very much, is when often, simple, elder, village people come from within the audience and tell us how they like the fact that we are playing “their” old and sometimes forgotten songs and how they like the fact that we are making them sound interesting also to the younger generations living in the cities, who has grown up with different kinds of music, mainly Greek pop music and western music.

What’s your main ambition with this album?

KRISTI : First of all to transform the moving feeling we get ourselves when playing these songs. And further on, to turn listeners’ attention to this kind of music and make them also listen to the original versions, as well as to the old masters playing and singing these songs.

STATHIS: To have listeners “travel” with it, like we do, as well as still enjoy it when listening to it after years.

Kristi plays Indian harmonium and Stahis plays the lauto – could you both please tell me how you got started with those instruments and what they mean to you?

STATHIS: I started playing the laouto because I like the combination of percussion and string instrument sound that it has. It is also the common instrument in almost all Greek traditional music, something like the guitar in western music.

KRISTI: The Indian harmonium on the other hand has nothing to do with Greek traditional music. But we liked the way its breathing drone embraces the sound of the lute. Accordions are used in folk music in the North of Greece. Electric keyboards were also often used in panigiria, the local fiestas, in the 60s and 70s. They were considered very kitsch, and this sound was very much looked down upon. But there are some very important, elder panigiria players of the older hammonds and farfisa keyboards, who have created their own, unique way of playing, imitating the sound of the Greek folk clarinet. I am trying to learn from them, I am somehow imitating their way when I play my harmonium. How I got it? Alen Ginsberg was reading his poetry accompanying himself with the drone of a small, portable Indian harmonium. Also Nico, the legendary rock singer and personality of my once very much beloved band, the Velvet Underground, was playing it in her later years. Then of course I also very much liked how it is played by Pakistani masters, like the Sabri Brothers, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, etc. I very much wanted to find and buy a nicely sounding portable Indian harmonium, which I managed to in one of our India trips. I am not an expert instrumentalist my self and I am playing it in a very simple way. But I feel this instrument breathing together with me when I sing and I very much like this resonance feeling.

Right now you are number 1 on Wold Music Charts Europe. What does that mean to you?

STATHIS: Charts were something that I was never paying any attention to. The music that I am listening to is rarely in any charts. But the news that we are in no1 made me feel really happy and honored and gave me a strong courage to continue, especially in those difficult times here.

KRISTI: It makes us feel happy, honored and kind of proud to be able to send a positive message from our country that is suffering these days.

Obviously for a long time now we are used to hear news about the economical situation in Greece. How does that affect you as musicians, and how do you view the future of your country?

STATHIS: The economic situation of the last years was something that we were expecting to happen, but not in such a huge scale. The last two years we pay taxes that almost exceed our income, we feel that we are getting officially robbed by the Greek state and, hoping that we or our family will not have any serious health problems, we may soon start to face serious every-day problems, if this goes on like this. Most of our friends are unemployed, at the age of 45-55 which means that nobody will ever ask them to work again. People are desperate. Greece is a Balkan country, close to North Africa and The Middle East, this is an explosive combination. On the other hand this crisis has already been a chance for a big change in the Greek state system and thinking. Because in Greece you have this combination of European, Balkan, African and Asian mentality, a peculiarity that can be a useful tool of knowledge for real contact in many areas between eastern and western Europe, Israel, Turkey, the Arabic world as well as the north of Africa. This is already happening in music.

KRISTI: Greece is situated in the crossroads between the three large continents, Europe, Asia and Africa. We Greeks have elements from all these areas in our character, in our culture and in our music. This is one of our problems in terms of identity. But this is also one of our great virtues.

You have sometimes been compared to the Swedish group Hedningarna. Do you feel related to their work musically, and what do you think about them?

STATHIS: I m happy that we have been compared to Hedningarna because I didn’t know anything about them and this is how I discovered their amazing music. I have this feeling that they also belong to “my generation”, grown up with this unity feeling of the rock music of 60s-70s, rediscovering with the same feeling their traditional music, played by old, local people in small villages, in places full of people, dancing, remaining alive without the need of promotion, video clip, interviews etc.

KRISTI : It is very interesting and it is very moving to find artists on the other side of the world that have received similar seeds of ideas, of tastes, of creativity and are following similar routes.

Could you mention other artists/groups that have inspired you or that you just enjoy listening to?

STATHIS: In the 60s, my uncle listening to and dancing the zeibekiko, in 70s another uncle dancing Pontiaka, in 80s Parvas playing laouto in his café in Chora of Amorgos. And among all these, rock music, punk and later Sufi music, Indian music, music from Africa, a never ending list.,a very small piece of the music of this planet.

KRISTI : The recent years I very much enjoy listening to the old masters of demotika songs, Byzantine chanting and music from India. The sounds that I grew up with and was influenced by are similar to those Stathis mentioned. Rock music, especially of the psychedelic groups, was what influenced my life and ideology during my youth. My teenage beloved singers and personalities were Grace Slick, Nico, Patti Smith and Kate Bush a bit later. Nowadays I prefer listening to Indian singers like Kishori Amonkar, Greek traditional singers, like our late Domna Samiou, the island singer Anna Karambesini, old rembetiko ladies, like Marika Papangika and Roza Eskenazy.

Unfortunately I don’t understand Greek so all I know about the lyrics is what I’ve been able to read in English, but generally the album sounds dramatic and at time melancholic and full of sadness. How does this correspond to life in Greece 2012? ”Anamesa nissirou”, for example I understand is about a ship in dangerous waters, with the crew praying for help. Do you in any way have the current situation of your country in mind when you play that song?

KRISTI : Well… in that song it’s the crew of the sinking boat praying for help and promising to offer in return … silver candles to the saint who will save them… A centuries old traditional song… But the reason we chose to add it in our album is just that it’s a very beautiful and moving song, and that I very much enjoy singing its unfolding melody.

STATHIS: Another example is “Me Gelasan Ta Poulia”, “The birds they cheated me”. It reminds me of the time between 2000-2007 when all us Greeks had every day telephones and letters from the banks begging us to take loans for a new car, a new house, vacations, Christmas gifts etc.

Lately I’ve been listening to old, bluesy rembetika music from this box: http://www.amazon.com/Rembetika-Greek-Music-From-Underworld/dp/B000FOQHJO. Do you have any relation to that music?

KRISTI : Rembetika is urban folk music. They call them the Greek blues and they are very much well known and popular both in Greece and abroad. The Greek folk songs that were born and are still alive in the rural areas of Greece are the demotika. These two kinds of Greek folk music have few differences in the instruments used, different attitude and different ethics behind them, but have the same roots in terms of musical scales and rhythms.

STATHIS: Rembetika is one of my favorite styles of music. My grandmother and grandfather were deported from Minor Asia during the1922 Asia Minor disaster, like many of the rembetes. My grand father used to sing amanedes in family gatherings. My uncle was telling me that when I was a small child he had given me a baglama as a present and that I was playing with it, something I don’t recall. But rembetika were supposed to be “bad” music, because of the hash lyrics, and the word rembetis was an insult. I rediscovered rembetika in the beginning of the 80s, it was the time of the renaissance of the rembetika music and the creation of a new rembetika scene in Greece.

What are your plans for the future like? Touring, making new music? Any plans of coming to Sweden?

KRISTI : We would very much like to come in Sweden, especially after this long, hot summer that we have had here this year. We have never toured or visited any of the Scandinavian countries. And for me, the fact that Scandinavia is so much way up North, with such a different climate than ours and with these very long days and nights, makes it kind of mythical to my mind. We don’t have any specific plans for the future, but planned or not planned, we in any case keep on making new music, because this is what we like doing.

STATHIS: We are making music all the time together with Kristi, we have many ideas and new songs.

Olof Peronius

Freegan Kolektiva: You just delivered a captivating and successful album (2 months No.1 in the World Music Charts of Europe). How do you feel about the result?

KRISTI: Thanks for your good words. It’s a nice feeling to know that there are people out there listening to this CD and sharing the same joy, like the joy we felt when we were creating it.

STATHIS: We feel quite happy with this, it gives us courage, especially in these difficult times.

Freegan Kolektiva: What inspired you during the conception and recording of Greekadelia?

STATHIS: We are always amazed with the “soul power” of the old recordings which is something usually lost in modern albums. Our effort was to reach and keep that feeling.

KRISTI: A feeling of going-back-to-the-basics. Listening and learning from the old masters of demotika songs [Greek: δημοτικά, a host of Greek folk music forms] is like walking on the steps of a yearlong opened pathway. There is a connection with the subconscious memories of childhood, a connection with nature, which is so apparent in these songs.

I also enjoyed very much working as a duet with Stathis who did the recordings all by himself at our home, using very basic equipment, very few channels, determined to creating this psychedelic “wall of sound” only with the use of very few instruments – this gave us a feeling of  freedom and independence.

Freegan Kolektiva: When I watched your performance roughly a year ago the feeling of “exploring life” was revoked in me. It seemed like you are researching around the world and you bring us wonderful stories illuminated in your songs…Is my intuition right?

KRISTI: More than a singer, a musician, or anything else, I feel I am a story teller, collecting stories and experiences that I like to share with other people through art.

STATHIS: There are many feelings inside of us that we like to share. I am happy that we managed to revoke some of the good ones.

One can be sitting still in one place, but travelling at the same time. Travelling inside, travelling in the past, travelling in the future.

Filmed at the magical Greek island of Astypalaia (where FK’s spirit was partly nurtured as well)  from 2003′s album Secret Of The Rocks:

Freegan Kolektiva: Your previous album ‘Taxidoscopio’ has to do with travelling the world. I personally know many constant travellers and sometimes they seem to be suffering from “not belonging to any society” or feeling that “the ideal place is always elsewhere”. Considering that at the same time you are getting deeper in your Greek roots, what do you think about the balance between travelling the world and delving into your own culture?

STATHIS:  Travelling, among other things, is also helping me to observe the small changes happening in a global scale. It also helps me realise and enjoy the real beauties of the place where I live. It was in South East Asia, back in 1986, when I first realised that the music heard and played there was the same Anglo-Saxon pop music heard and played also in my homeland. I didn’t like this homogenization. I felt that the planet was slowly tending to become a… boring place. The balance between travelling the world and delving in your own culture is simple: Be yourself. I am not trying to be “traditional” or “modern” or whatever.

KRISTI: Travelling has to do with space, but also with time. One can be sitting still in one place, but travelling at the same time. Travelling inside, travelling in the past, travelling in the future.

As for this common and natural human feeling of “the ideal place being always elsewhere”, I am trying to get rid of it and cultivate inside me the opposite feeling: “The ideal place is always where you find yourself!”

Freegan Kolektiva: I am afraid that I cannot escape this one – it is the constant question I get when I am outside of Greece… How do you experience the current situation in Greece (economic and not only crisis)?

KRISTI: Like all Greeks we are also facing big economic problems. We are paying unbelievably large taxes, which are nowadays actually larger than our real income. But because we are musicians, belonging to a music scene which is not the mainstream scene here, we are kind of used to this economic instability and uncertainty about the future etc. Therefore we know a bit better how to handle all this – anyway, we have been living a very simple life. But all our friends who had a stable job and are now unemployed, are desperate, depressed and hopeless.  The fact that I have travelled a lot around the world, especially in countries that have experienced recent civil wars, or a collapse of their systems, makes me a more aware of the results of such things on humans and on societies. I am therefore trying to be more positive and to spread the feeling of compassion and unity in our society and not let hatred make things even worse. Fanaticism is rising and this leads always backwards… if not in even worse situations…

STATHIS: When you travel, when you read history, or read the news, you realise that until now we have been very lucky compared to other countries or to other eras. Is it maybe now our turn to suffer?

We are kind of used to this economic instability and uncertainty about the future. Therefore we know a bit better how to handle all this – anyway, we have been living a very simple life

Freegan Kolektiva: Considering the scale of social problems ordinary Greeks face, the upsurge of fascism etc. I would expect that Greek artists would be at the frontlines of social uprising – is it at the end that art has lost some ‘edge’ after the 1970s?

KRISTI : I don’t believe in revolution, I believe in the evolution of the human mind. I believe only this can bring real social change and not just a change of the ones on power. As for the Greek artists of the 70’s who were in the front line of social uprising, I am old enough to have also seen, in which kind of frontlines they found themselves later in time, until nowadays…

STATHIS: In these difficult times I don’t want to push people to fight one another for any reason, I’m interested in what unites people and I strongly believe that music has the power to do this.

Freegan Kolektiva: Do you think art is a potential inspiration for social change?

KRISTI: Of course art is an inspiration for the improvement of human nature, to start with. Societies are formed by individuals and changing ones-self to the better, we are changing one part of the society, which is certainly reflecting also to the rest of it. This is a good start… This, I think, is where we should all be starting from.

STATHIS: If you look back in the 60s and 70s, pop and rock music of the times made a big social change. On the other hand, Germany of the 30s was the country where most of philosophers, musicians, writers etc were born and living, but this did not stop Nazism from rising…

“I’m interested in what unites people and I strongly believe that music has the power to do this.”

Freegan Kolektiva: Describe us your daily musical activities

KRISTI : A vocal practice on scales in the morning, waking up my breathing and my hearing of vibrations, a very useful thing to do. This has become a kind of a meditation for me. Then practicing the instruments, either alone, or playing together with Stathis, trying to improve my technique. I have been very lazy with this all my life until now, but nowadays the study of music makes me feel well and centered.  In the evenings we play, record, experiment, write new music and songs, etc together with Stathis. When friends who are also musicians are in our home, we play altogether.

This is the nice part of our everyday work. There is also a not so beautiful part, which has to do with a lot of “office work”. It’s the management part like organizing the tours, etc, which we are doing all by ourselves and sometimes it becomes really time consuming. But unfortunately, since the passing away of our manager and very dear friend Thaleia Iakovidou, who was a person of the same wave length like ours, there has been no other person that we liked and trusted enough, to become our new “representative”.

STATHIS: In general, we have periods of time when we are extremely stressful with all these and periods of time when we are doing absolutely nothing.

Freegan Kolektiva: There is a great diversity of folk styles in Greece (demotika). How do you come in contact with all those styles? Do you think these styles are preserved or that they can be even pushed into the future?

KRISTI: Although the media is not presenting it at all, demotika music, songs and dancing is an alive scene in Greece and involves some very important musicians and singers. The various different styles just go on existing locally, without the need for any publicity, any record labels, managers etc. Panigiria (Greek: πανηγύρι, village folk festivities) are alive and a lot of people are enjoying them. The evolution in this type of music comes by itself, based mostly on the needs and the habits of the folk musicians and not so much on an artistic prospect. I do not like so much some of the ways the demotika songs are nowadays presented in panigiria, but that’s just my own taste, other people may very well enjoy them. Then there is also a very interesting trend within certain groups of younger musicians, who are very much leaning towards our tradition, and that is very nice and moving. Only sometimes, these young musicians are so much dedicated, they are falling in the trap of becoming too academic, which is then leading to the opposite end of the string.

STATHIS: I’m a city boy. My first contact with demotika came when I was a punk rocker and went to a pontiaka fiesta (Greek: ποντιακά, music of the Pontic Greeks). I was blown away by the power of the music and the dance. And the same happened to me later on, while travelling together with Kristi in isolated villages of Greece and listening to the spontaneous glendia (Greek: γλέντια, revelries that usually involve food, wine or raki, impulsive music and dancing) and  panigiria taking place in the local kafeneia (Greek: καφενεία, the traditional cafeterias which serve as the meeting points of all vellagers). This music is active, it is evolving and everything that is evolving is pushed to the future.

Although the media is not presenting it at all, demotika music, songs and dancing is an alive scene in Greece…The various different styles just go on existing locally, without the need for any publicity, any record labels, managers…This music is active, it is evolving and everything that is evolving is pushed to the future.

Freegan Kolektiva: Do you think that young people in Greece feel part of their traditions? All around the world, especially in urban societies, youngsters want to detach themselves from traditions – at the same time traditions revive within ‘alternative’ circles.

KRISTI : All the new, innovative things, come from what is “called” alternative circles. It is those circles that are pushing art and literature and ideas and ways of thinking forwards. Urban societies have become too tough, so it is natural that the “best minds of this generation” are turning their interest to traditions. As long as this trend is a moving-forward-through-the-past trend, I like it very much. When it goes together with conservatism, I don’t like it.

STATHIS: In Greece traditional music was combined with dictatorship, conservatism, the priest of the village etc. The last years this is changing, many youngsters that in previous years they would have been listening to rock music they are bored of the same totally commercial industrialised so called “rock” sound and they are discovering, playing and studying traditional music.

The last years this is changing, many youngsters that in previous years they would have been listening to rock music they are bored of the same totally commercial industrialised so called “rock” sound and they are discovering, playing and studying traditional music.

Freegan Kolektiva: According to me, there are not many artists in the current world music scene that sound like you. What do think? Are there any contemporary artists or a particular ‘scene’ that you feel related to?

STATHIS: I’m happy with what you are saying, although it is not our intention, it’s not our purpose to try to sound different.

KRISTI: But also, we never imitated anybody in our music, at least not consciously. We are somehow in our own “cloud” and we like to do things in our own way and with our own taste. Still, we do not mind at all that our albums are classified under the term “world music”, since this term is very wide and includes a lot of different genres from around the globe.

Freegan Kolektiva: Your sound features an unusual combination of instruments like laouto [Greek lute], Indian harmonium, live looping. How did you come up with this?

STATHIS: The laouto is the main string instrument of Greek traditional music. I love the combination of harmony and percussion sound that it has. I also love electronics and the variety of sounds one can create through them.

KRISTI: Years ago I had seen some of my early “heroes” using the Indian harmonium. Personalities like Nico, the German lady singer who had also co-operated with the Velvet Underground, like Alen Ginsberg, who was reading his poetry accompanied by the drone of a similar harmonium. So I very much wanted to get one Indian harmonium myself, and it was years later, that I managed to find and buy one in one of our trips to India. I started playing with it at home and that was it, I felt like this instrument was breathing together with me, embracing my voice and the lute of Stathis in such a warm way. It has become one of my best friends now.

Freegan Kolektiva:  Do you want to share with us any other Greek folk artists that we definitely need to check out?

STATHIS: Domna Samiou, Stelios Foustalieris, Giorgos Koros, Petroloukas Chalkias, Psarantonis, Michalis Zografidis, Solon Lekas to name a few. Among the more recent bands, Mode Plagal is my favorite.

KRISTI : I would more or less name the same musicians and many many more. But I would like to add also: You asked us of “any other” folk artist… We do not think of ourselves as folk artist. What we are doing, as was written somewhere, is re-inventing folk music. If we had tried to play the songs exactly like they were originally played, we simply wouldn’t be authentic ourselves… We are remaining authentic, by presenting the demotika songs in our own way, and we just hope and wish that our recordings and our gigs will turn the attention of the listeners also to the old, original versions of our folk tradition.

Greekadelia has risen right to the top of the chart, beating competition from other big world music names including Mariem Hassen and Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars.

Kristi & Stathis previously topped the chart and remained in the top ten for six whole months with their 2003 album The Secrets of Rocks. Greekadelia has spurred press interest and recieved great reviews with critic Robin Denselow calling the album, ‘A highly original, compelling set’ (The Guardian, June 2012).

“Reinvented folk” is how these young musicians like to describe their art, but with its ancient vocal undertones their down-home reinvention goes back to the music’s source’. - The Independent. 

The Greek duo set traditional demotika songs for harmonium and lauto, then pump them up with samples. With a blast of a seashell horn and a mangled announcement from a ferry captain, Stassinopoulou and Kalyviotis set off on a tour of Greece, setting traditional demotika songs for harmonium and lauto (the Greek lute), then pumping them up with samples’. - Financial Times.

 Source

Interview / portait, Francisco Lopez Frias

Read this interview in Spanish

Kristi Stassinopoulou, who in the past emulated singers such as Nico, Patty Smith, Blondie or Kate Bush and has since been compared to vocalists such as Marta Sebastyen or Björk; whilst her music has been compared to that of groups like Malicorne,Hedningarna, Steelye Span or Dead Can Dance, was one of the final artists to perform at the culture forum in Barcelona over this past frenetic music-filled summer and will remain indelibly stamped in our memories. Indeed, Kristi managed to captivate us with her personal legacy, christened balkan ethnotrance with touches of psychedelic rock, on three warm evenings in the late summer; a summer that in fact was already over in everything but the weather. 

This was the first time Kristi performed in Barcelona and, much to my regret, I was unfortunate to only attend the third and last performance – a day before this interview – in which she decided not to repeat her repertoire, in contrast to the majority of the other artists at the concert. As luck would have it, this multifaceted Greek singer – with parallel studies in dramatic art, Byzantine music and classical voice training, also a published author of two novels “Seven times in Amorgos” and “The Fiery Sword”, who demands so much of herself, included only a few touches of her excellent last album “The Secrets of the Rocks” in this third concert.

“We never play the same song list from one concert to the next, as we usually include songs from all three albums that Stathis Kaliviotis and I have made together.”

Α performance in which she managed to show off her talent as an interpreter.
“I don’t act on stage, but rather I like to communicate on all levels, not only on a musical level; I like to also use body language. I love dancing – I studied ballet dancer when I was young.”

After these statements, the first thing that came to mind seeing her face, is her extraordinary resemblance, in my personal opinion, to Canadian harpist and singer, Loreena McKennitt, with whom she shares some less prosaic and more artistic similarities including a certain aura of mysticism that surrounds her on stage and her obsession with vocal harmonies.

“I know Loreena McKennitt. In 1991, before producing the three most important albums of my career as an artist, we performed a repertoire of folk songs from all over the world, many of which were songs from around the Mediterranean with very different arrangements (for example, in African key). At a certain moment a person approached me and gave me an album that reminded her very much of me (laughter). But the career of this Greek singer took off a few years back when she was chosen to perform musical operas such as Jesus Christ Superstar (in which she played Mary Magdalen) and Evita (in which she played the lover of General Peron), and subsequently in 1983, when she participated in the Eurovision Song Contest – a curious coincidence noted in other singers of world music such as Ofra Haza from Egypt and Dulce Pontes from Portugal with similar Eurovision exposure. With the passage of time these could be interpreted either as simply necessary steps in a performer’s progress to develop their own true forms of musical expression that are of a less commercial nature; or as professional errors to regret because of their important repercussions.

“In the beginning of my career as a singer in Greece, the first thing I did, before even studying, was to play in rock groups at school. I wanted to make music and to be able to produce my own work. This was a difficult task, as the type of music I always wanted to interpret is not easy to classify or categorise. I grew up with rock, but at the same time I was fascinated by folk music, both from Greece and the Balkans. I also enjoyed rock-operas like “Jesus Christ Superstar”, which I used to perform with my band, at school. So when the show came to Greece, I went for an audition and I was offered the part of Mary Magdalen. My participation in the Eurovision Song Contest was a bit of an accident, because the songwriter was a friend of mine; he requested that I record the song for the demo, which in the end was selected for the contest. Moreover, in 1986, I released my first album, which was pop music and was a great commercial hit. At the time I thought that this was the best manner to proceed and be able to attain what I was most interested in. But this was a big mistake, as the major labels classified me as a typical girl able to record commercial pop successfully. As I did not agree, I did not release many albums between 1987 and 1997, which was the year in which I finally released “Ifantokosmos”… Although, actually there was another album before that in 1993, with a different composer. But I must admit that in general I have always tried to make the best of all my experiences. And all of this constituted a great experience in order to discover what I should avoid in the future. If you are able to go against other people’s views and take decisions that are risky, everything becomes a very good lesson and the experience is transformed into a pleasant one, in the sense that it teaches you a lot”. In this respect it appears that a key event for Kristi, was meeting Stathis Kalyviotis, in the nineties, who composed almost all the songs in this new phase in which the artist was reborn as an artist. “Yes, it is true that I started doing my own thing in my albums and working with small companies when I met Stathis Kaliviotis, my songwriter, who is also my husband and with whom I have lived for the last 15 years. We started making ethnopunk music as a group, but did not receive the support of the major record companies, conversely though we were a great success with the people frequenting the small Athenian clubs. The next step was the album “Ifantokosmos”, the first of the three, which I now consider to be more in my taste and the type of album I like to produce.”

This album, which was produced in 1997, was followed by “Echotropia” in 1999 and, finally, “The Secrets of the Rocks” in 2002 (which was released in Spain by Resistencia, in 2003). Three musical offerings, which nevertheless, do not have major similarities. “No, the first album contains more of a folk-rock sound and is less electronic. Most of the songs were played live at the studio, with our band at the time. We had more studio time at our disposal for the second album, because the first album let us get a better contract, which was the reason why we managed to experiment more with electronic technology. This third and latest work was put together in our small studio at home, using the computer a lot, making use of sampling, live looping etc. In this case we only went to a big studio in order to remix the recordings. This was for reasons of convenience, as when you work at home, it is possible that the sound achieved lacks the perfection of the studio, but you actually perform it at the perfect moment. The album is entitled“The Secret of the Rocks”, because it was conceived on the beaches of the Islands of the Aegean (Cyclades), where there are no trees, few plants and only rocks and sea. A landscape in which goats and lizards amicably co-exist. Where, apparently, the night is filled with whispers, insinuations, intriguing laughter and footsteps on a backdrop of pebbles in a rocky coastline with the wind caressing the waves. This is the bucolic setting that they become a part of with their own instruments: the guitar, the flute and the minidisk.
“We started the process of recording in the following manner: firstly we started with the original songs, interpreted with the help of only the lute or the baglama, but without pre-recorded sounds, except for some small samples that were used later when recording at my house. Those sounds were recorded in the atmosphere you have described, living freely next to the sea, sleeping on the beach. This is what we have always done since I was very young, when I started out as an artist. Once we had put together all the songs for the album we started to add these recordings or samples of waves, pebbles, goat bells…” From this coastal enclave, our artist experienced her first dose of Mediterranean music (Italian, Turkish, Balkan, including Byzantine…). The foreign broadcasting stations that she captured on her long wave transistor radio started forging Kristi’s important relationship to the sea, the sounds of nature and the environment, a frugal life without urban comforts in which symbols of integration were as simple as practicing nudism and basic sustenance. Something, which made me think, in her case, of the perfect links, such as those of a chain, between the counter-cultural aesthetics of the hippy movement in the 60s and 70s and the philosophical – vital new age position of the 70s and 80s.

“I believe that you might well be right in that there is a connection between the hippie movement and new age. By that I mean that after the nineties this culture and way of life is starting to make a come back, especially among very young people. Musically speaking, I believe with these trends and types of music are expanding and evolving in circles all the time. I am not overly preoccupied with what is considered in or out, at a given moment in time. On the other hand, I don’t feel part of the New Age movement or any other movement or category as such classifications end up limiting you. What I personally do as an artist, is try to make music with the means that I have at my disposal. So if this is called world music, ethnic, new age, or electronica, it makes no difference to us. But I also understand the need at certain times to have recourse to particular terms in order to describe what each artist is doing. I simply don’t like to be classified or placed in a specific box or section, because certain people like to use those terms in order to describe ideology along with music.”

In fact her second album of this new phase, “Echotropia”, reached number six in 2000 and at the end of the same year ranked no 35 in the World Music Charts Europe. And the success of “Secrets of the Rocks” was even greater, reaching number 1 in 2003 and with a year-end ranking number of 6. Something which Kristi assimilated without qualms. This success is similar to the results achieved by other popular Greek artists who have in recent years increased their international presence as a consequence of an audience that shows an increasing interest in ethnic music and roots. Vocalists like Giorgos Dallaras, Eleftheria Arvanitaki, Alkistis Protopsalti, Haris Alexiou or Savina Yannatou, but Kristidoes not appear to share their goals.

“No, I don’t have anything in common with those musicians, except Savina Yannatou. But this does not mean that I have anything against what they are doing; they are very good artists. Only that they have taken a different direction from me. They are involved in projects that, for the most part, are more related to the idea of singing and less to creating. When I was younger I felt more like them, a singer, but now I must admit that I enjoy the process of writing and composing more, because I enjoy the way that we work together with Stathis, sitting in the studio compiling songs and collecting, changing, selecting, editing sounds. Though I have already mentioned that I respect them very much as artists. Savina Yannatou is a very good friend whom I consider as one of the best singers around. She is also doing her own thing and in Greece we are both considered as artists belonging to the same style of interpreters, far removed from the circle of Eleftheria, Alkistis or Dallaras …Although I repeat they are very well known and, of course, a lot more popular than us in Greece.”

Something which comes through very clearly is that she adores the Mediterranean Sea, a main source of inspiration to her both as an artist and as a person. Therefore, it is logical that she shares the idea of a supra-national culture of all peoples bordering on this sea, the existence of cultural and musical identities with common links that can unite or link the Balkans of Goran Brejovic to Mallorca of Maria del Mar Bonet or Sardinia of Elena Ledda to Naples of Eugenio Bennato …

“I know Maria del Mar Bonet and I find many connections in the music of those Mediterranean artists that you mentioned. As I said in the beginning, in 1991, when I hadn’t yet recorded any of those three albums with Stathis, I received a demo, which in actual fact was a compilation of new arrangements on songs from the Mediterranean written by artists like Radio Tarifa, Goran Bregovic, Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popular, musicians from Tunis… At the time we were making covers of those songs in order to include them in our concerts, and christened the performance “Lingua Franca”, as this was the language spoken by 12th Century merchants in the Mediterranean. A mixture of languages, which permitted them to communicate with each other. We thought it the best name for the type of repertoire demonstrating how many things Mediterranean countries have in common”.

Your “Secrets of the Rocks ” booklet is really very secretive. You mention places like R…, G.., and E., For the foreign travellers to Greece, could you explain what these places mean to you? And are there still some deserted islands in Aegean or Ionian seas?

Kristi- In my first album, back in 1986, there was a song that was speaking about one secret beach near Athens, where no cars could arrive. People had to climb for one hour inside a rocky pine forest in order to reach this natural sea paradise, where there were no umbrellas, no bars and lights and of course no… bathing suits. Few people knew Ramnunda then. But that song of mine became a radio hit. And next summer, the beach was filled with people. Unfortunately some of them would leave their garbage there. Others were bringing their loud cassette recorders. Others were wearing bathing suits and maybe looking at the nude naturalists with a bad glance. I didn’t feel good with what had happened to that secret beach due to my song. I felt responsible. This is the reason why both Stathis and I didn’t want to put on the cover of our album the whole names of those few secret, remote beaches of those faraway, not yet exploited by tourism islands, where we often like to live for some days with our tend or even without a tend, just with our sleeping bags and where The Secrets of The Rocks were written.

Yes, one can still find some such places on some small, remote Greek islands. I suggest to those who may be interested, to travel south and search for them. It’s much nicer when you discover a beautiful, hidden place by your self, than when you are told by someone else or have read about it.

Stathis-I’m sure there must be in the Czech Republic too some similar “secret” places near rivers or lakes or whatever , where people can go and enjoy nature.

In your concerts, you explained baglamas was prohibited in the 20’s. Could you tell more? Were musicians put into prison? Did the prohibition also included other instruments, like saz or bouzouki?

Kristi- It was in the mid 30’s when the string instrument bouzouki and the vocal improvisations on eastern scales, called amanes, were prohibited by a new law of the dictator of the times called Metaxas (nothing to do with the famous Greek Metaxa drink!). In 1922 many Greek refuges from Minor Asia had come to Greece in terrible condition. They would gather in those small private places, backyards or taverns, that were called tekes and smoke hush and play their rembetika songs of sorrow and pain with their bouzouki. But at that time the dictator Metaxas didn’t like this eastern atmosphere and mentality. He kept saying and he was also trying to impose this to the rest of the people, that Greece belonged to the west and not to the east. So he made this law and the rembetes were often captured and put in jail. It was then that they started to use baglamas, which is like a bouzouki, but much smaller. Because of it’s small size they could keep this instrument hidden inside the jail and under their coat when on the road. I really cannot tell how they were able to “hide” it’s ear piercing, crying sound when they were “secretly” playing it.

And by the way, hash smoking was also important part of the rembetika tradition. You mentioned this habit during your Prague concert, in a different context. Does the connection between herbs and music have different level/meaning in Greece, than in the hippies and rasta culture?

Kristi- It has exactly the same meaning in certain kinds of Greek music, like in rembetika, and in some of the laika songs, which is a continuity of rembetika. I wouldn’t say hash smoking has much to do with other kinds of Greek music, like with dimotika, which means the traditional songs of the rural areas of Greece. Remember that rembetika were songs of the city.

Stathis- Rembetika has to do more with the Blues culture.
Ross Daly once told me about a lira player who catches bees, puts them into plastic bag and then plays their “music” on his instrument. On you Prague concert, you mentioned a bouzouki player who learns music from imitating nature. Could you explain more about this method?

Kristi -It’s funny because in our previous album Echotropia, we have a song called Beehives, in which Stathis has recorded bees in a field and then turned their recorded buzz into a rhythm loop.

In the show I was talking about Giorgos Zambetas, a very famous songwriter of laika songs who has passed away.

He was a very interesting figure and some of his sayings and lots of stories about him are often mentioned. One of these, was that when once he was asked in an interview, how he had learned to play his bouzouki, he had answered, “by listening to the frogs”. It’s not a method of learning. It’s just to have open ears and listen to the environment around you. There is music everywhere. And as Aristotle had said, art is an imitation of nature. If you listen to the sounds of a jungle, all those birds bubbling rhythmically, you can tell why music from Africa and from South America is so rhythmical. Listen to the wind which never stops for days on some Greek islands and you will feel why in traditional Greek and in Byzantine music there is always one monotone sound backing up the main melody, giving that psychedelic feeling of dizziness. Rock music is also the music of the environment of it’s era of cars and loud machines. And nowadays, isn’t it electronica, what we are listening to all day? Mobiles ringing everywhere and little computer sounds all around us?

A sailor’s question: When you told the story behind Calima, you talked about all this humidity and headache coming from this southern wind. The same situation is explained in the Visconti’s film Death in Venice, when scirocco comes and makes the main hero suffers even more than you suffered at Canaries. So, is Calima more like scirocco or like Livas?

Kristi- I love this talk about the winds and their names! So in Venice it is the scirocco wind that bothers them. I didn’t remember this interesting detail from that beautiful film. Scirocco in Greece we call specifically the wind that comes from south east. They say that it can sometimes become dangerous for boats because when the night falls it becomes very strong. Livas is a very hot, burning wind that comes from the south and brings to the Greek peninsula the sand of the Sahara desert. This creates headaches to people. You wake up some mornings and there may be sand on your car, your balcony, the streets. In the Canary island the wind which is creating similar effects comes from the east, because these islands are on the Atlantic ocean opposite the west coast of Africa, so the wind of the Sahara is travelling from the east to the west to arrive on top of them and blur the atmosphere of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where I learned about all these.

Czech people are not familiar of Greek music. What you would recommend from past? Do you have any personal heroes on the Greek scene?

Kristi- I would recommend albums of rembetes Vassilis Tsitsanis and Marcos Vamvakaris, to mention 2 of the most wellknown and goodquality, authentic rembetes, and of the songwriter Manolis Chiotis, who innovated the style of bouzouki playing and somehow started the scene of laika songs. I would also recommend albums of authentic, traditional, rural Greek music. All the albums of Mrs. Domna Samiou, the lady of Greek traditional music, a very impressive singer herself. Travelling around Greece for years, she has gathered and put in albums some of the nicest songs of various areas of Greece, performed mostly by herself and by some of the best traditional musicians of Greece. I would also recommend the songwriter, lyra player from the island of Crete, Psarantonis. In his own magical way, he is the living tradition of Cretan music. I would also recommend the 2 famous Greek composers that have become classic, Manos Chadzidakis and Mikis Theodorakis. Their songs and music is a somehow more sophisticated approach to the tradition of rembetika and laika songs.

Stathis- Other personal heroes are Anestis Delias from the rembetika era.He was Keith Richards of the rembetes but he was not that lucky and died young.

Dionysis Savopoulos also is a figure that especially between 1970 to 1980 was my hero. He was the first Greek songwriter who combined rock music with Greek and Balkan traditional music and created a new sound.

What kind of “formal” musical education did you get? Conservatory, Byzantine music school?

Kristi- I went to both and learned a little of both kinds of music. But I am not a very much formally educated musician, mainly because I am lazy. As Stathis is often telling me, I became lazy, just because I am able to any time open my mouth and sing, which needs less practise than to learn an instrument and anyway you can make music just with this.

Stathis- I ‘m learning music mostly by myself. Listening to music, playing with others, imitating my hero musicians! I also studied in a Conservatory at the 90’s.

And how did you develop your art of writing lyrics? Do you have any favourite poets, drama writers, novelists?

Kristi- Writing comes out of me very naturally since I was a child. I never say to myself you have to sit down and write a lyric, it’s the lyric itself which is violently waking me up and makes me get out of bed, go find a pencil and put it down, so as to get rid of it and relax and be able to sleep again. By the way, the same thing is happening to Stathis with most of the melodies he has written. As for readings, I very much like one Greek contemporary poet by the name Iannis Ifantis. I love and I would recommend to a foreigner the classical novels of Alexandros Papadiamantis, the “Greek Dostoyefski”, who lived in the beginning of the 20th century. I know some of them have been translated at least in German. In German there is also a translation of a long novel of Zirana Zateli, a very magical, contemporary Greek woman writer.
From abroad I love Tom Robins! I also enjoy Clive Barker’s fantasy fiction. But I don’t read much fiction anymore. I mostly like to read theoretical books about various subjects that interest me, like Yoga, Nature, Eastern and ancient Religions and rituals, mysticism, history, travelling.
There seem to be a newly found understanding between Turkish and Greek musicians and audiences. How the Greeks see Turks now? And how do they enjoy Turkish music?

Kristi- Greek and Turkish music have always been interacting with each other. Greeks and Turks are neighbours, so of coarse they get influenced by each other and nowadays they often play music together. You often find Turkish songs with Greek lyrics in the Greek music market and Greek songs with Turkish lyrics in the Turkish market. I think Turks and Greeks have become friends finally. We have so many things in common and in some cases, our music resembles very much.

Stathis- Turkish and Greek musicians where always cooperating. We are lucky that politicians and generals from both sides, have finally decided to keep on a peace process , so the audiences are positive now . There are no frontiers between musicians . And between all artists I presume.

Do you have any projects besides your band?

Kristi- I must admit that I don’t feel the need to mix with any other musical project, at least not now. I enjoy very much what we are doing together with Stathis: Writing songs in various places and then recording them in our home studio. Bringing our band to play on top and then edit and change things and try this and try that and argue and then come up with an album and then with rehearsals with the band and live concerts and more new songs etc etc. This whole thing is very fulfilling for me, because through our own songs and our own productions we are able to express our own truths, our own secrets, ideas feelings, in our own, personal way.

Stathis- I agree

The setup of your band changed since Echotropia times. What did make you to switch the setup?

Stathis- We have switched the set-up a lot of times. We don’t want to be a replica of ourselves.

Kristi- We got tired of our previous folk-rock sound of our live shows and wanted to experiment more with live made loops and percussions instead of drums. We like the way Stathis’s traditional string instrument and the electric guitar are mixed with these loops and with the bagpipes. This is how this “folktronic” sound came out. We often also use a lyra player together with the bagpipe, the string instruments, the percussions and the electronics. This last year, whenever we had the chance, Stathis and I also experimented on performances with just the two of us on stage, emphasizing mostly on the electronic part, with a lot of improvisation, live sampling etc.

And why you choose the Indian harmonium?

Kristi- Because from the first moment that I had seen and heard this instrument, played live by my “hero” Nico, I mean the singer of the Velvet Underground, who had come to Athens for a concert back in the mid 80ies, I fell in love with it and wanted to find one and buy it. Then of coarse years later Indian harmonium became more common as an Indian instrument, due to the rise of World Music. I bought this one in India this year and it makes me crazy how it breaths like a real person when you play it. Being a lazy musician, as I already admitted, I don’t play any complicated things on it, but I love to make it breath, coordinating it with my own breath when I sing and I feel like as if this is giving me a kind of a strange, double power when singing. My small, portable Indian harmonium has become a good friend of mine and I have named it Sitaram.
Stathis- In our live performances we need a “warm” sound, “pads” as they call them in music terms. But we really hate those huge sounds created by most of the synthesizers. So the Indian harmonium and the use of my set of filters and samples create the sound we want.

Did you have chance to perform in Turkey, Middle East, India? Could the Eastern audiences understand more deeply songs like Majoun than Europeans?

Kristi- We have only played in Tel Aviv in two festivals in 1998, when the political situation was different there. People were enthusiastic.

In Prague, the Saal Schick Brass band played the same festival as you, but one day earlier. Do you still have any common projects?

Kristi- Probably you didn’t hear that their concert was cancelled. They didn’t to come to Prague (there were no tickets I think) and didn’t play. But anyway I answer the question. From time to time the SSBB invite me and Stathis and we play with them in concerts. We enjoy very much doing this. When I sing with them, I love to hear their huge brass band’s sound in my ears. They are very good musicians and performers and they are very good friends!

Source

By Carlos Alarcon

Read this interview in Spanish

-Which is the secret that you have discovered with this new record?

The songs that are included in the album “The Secrets of the Rocks” were written by Stathis Kalyviotis and me while living freely with just our sleeping bags on remote seashores of faraway, small Cycladic islands. There, every day and every night, the moving pebbles of the seashore, the engines of the passing boats, the waves and the wind, the sound of the djembes playing all night, the bells of the wild goats running around us, were all telling us their secrets. Through this album we wanted to reveal these secrets.

-When I hear your songs, it seems that you are calling to present times the echoes of mythological ages. Does your music reflect the millennial Greece?

The strong vibrations of old times, still exist especially in unexploited places with a long history. One can feel in the air the sorrows and joys, the thoughts and the images of people that have lived there through the centuries and the millenniums. Their vibrations are stuck in time. When I sing, I do feel connected with this thing and the lyrics I sing, my lyrics, talk about such matters.

-Is freedom, in every sense, the basic condition and the starting point to compose your music?

Of course it is. Because when you feel free and therefore relaxed you become a better recipient and a better transmitter.

-What are you trying to reflect in your songs? What are you trying to communicate?

Through my songs I like to reveal the magic, which is hidden behind our common everyday thoughts and interests. I like to make people pay attention to this hidden other reality. It makes us wiser.

-You’ve talked about the danger for the natural environment and that inspired “The Secret of the Rocks”. Do you have hopes of saving it? What we can do from music?

In this album we decided to include these specific songs, so as to make it a “concept album” describing the kind of natural, free life which a whole community of people from Greece and from all over Europe like to live for some days or months every once in a while. I agree 100% with the straggle of some ecological groups to preserve species of animals that are getting lost. But how about this “specie” of humans that get dehumanised by every day life in big cities and needs to get away from all that, not by visiting a tourist ghetto, but by living freely near nature among other persons that have similar ideas and tastes.

“The Secrets of the Rocks” is dedicated to these people who have lived like that in the caves of Matala in Crete, or in Milopotas beach in Ios back in the early 60ies and in numerous other less famous similar places nowadays. More and more natural unexploited beaches are being destroyed or just forbidden for free campers and nudists year by year. They become full of cement, electricity and showing off of expensive swimming suits.

I hope that our music can make it’s listeners become more cool and love and therefore respect nature. This is not just good for nature itself, which anyway doesn’t care, but it is good for the people themselves. Our mind is widening while we gaze at the line of the horizon, but it is narrowing when we are just watching tv all day. And only wide open minds can save this world…

-Traditional instruments and electronics. Do you believe that it’s the future of popular music?

Stathis and I like very much to mix them. And he plays both. He uses a groove sampler and a groove box, exchanging and twisting loops and sounds that he has invented himself and on top of that, he often plays various Greek traditional string instruments. Then we also have a lot of hand percussion, played in our live shows by a friend percussionist and we also use the Greek bagpipe and various traditional flutes. This sound, as it comes in my ears, sounds like folk of the 21st century.

-Do you think that it exists a “mediterranean musical essence”? If answer is yes, what does it consist of? 

Back in the early 90ies, I was singing songs from the mediterenean sea arranged in our own way by the band we then had. We were playing songs from Spain, Italy, Tunisia, Israel, Turkey, Greece. They all had things in common.
I believe the temperature, the climate, the environment, the colours and scents around you, the rhythm of life of your country influence the way you sing and play music. And further more, the mediterenean sea was always being crossed by hundreds of boats on which merchants, musicians, and other professionals were travelling from one country to the other, exchanging ideas.

-What influences (not only in music, but in all of fields of life) you are picking up in your music? Where do you find inspiration?

The observance of nature, sounds and images around me, experiences from long travels, readings about ancient rituals and prehistoric religions, the wind through the bamboos, the sound of a folk fiesta from the nearby village, yoga, all these can suddenly become a source of inspiration.

-Some people compares you to Marta Sebestyen, Björk or Patti Smith. Do you believe you have things in common? 

I like all three of them very much. I don’t know whether we have things in common. It’s just that sometimes it is easier for people to describe a person or an artist by comparing it with someone who is wellknown.

-You started working with Stathis Kaliviotis at Selena band. Was this work a labour of pionners? How do you see your evolution since then?

We had big fun with SELANA. We were just four people in the band: drums, electric guitar, Stathis was playing bass and I was singing. That was it, pure garage sound. But we were playing rythms and scales based on Greek and Balkan traditional music. Very few people in town understood what we were doing. But they were really fanatics!
Then, when SELANA collapsed, Stathis and I went on making our own music and arrangements. We made a new group with a kind of a folk rock, ethnopunk sound, in which we were mixing electric and acoustic folk instruments, with drums. It was then that we released “Ifantokosmos” our first common album. Inbetween Stathis had started using the grove boxes and samplers, which are now playing one of the most significant roles in our music. ”Echotropia”, our next album was more electronic. The sound in each of our albums, is somehow always different than the sound of the previous one. We don’t know now what sound our next album will have.

-How people understand your music in Greece? Could you talk about the actual musical scene?

There are still those few, very fanatic people who follow me wherever I play and buy all my records. Mainly through a “from mouth to mouth” promotion year by year these people have become more and more. The last two, three years there are also those who got to know me and paid attention to my music because of the success it had outside of Greece, in Europe and N. America. This made things practically easier for me and for my music.

Generally speaking the commercial, mainstream music scene of Greece, is like everywhere in the world: a big market of musical recipes that resemble to each other, being just the products of the meetings of some managers that have to bring money to their companies.
Unfortunately, on the other side, the so called “non commercial” part, you have a lot of pompous, boring and conservative things going on. I feel sad to say that the cultural situation of my country nowadays is in a bad condition.
But there are also some authentic musicians and groups that really care about music. Very few of them manage to survive and go on. Most of them are usually just starving, so they are doing other jobs to survive.

-Are your concerts very different from your records?

I think they are better. Often we like to improvise on our songs. And very often after a good show, Stathis and I say to each other: We should have recorded it the way we played it today!

-Which are your future projects?

I do not work in terms of “projects”. We just like to jam in our home studio, record music and songs, play live. But we also like to spend days and weeks under one tree by the sea, to travel to India, to walk on the top of a mountain in Epirus or in the streets of Amsterdam, to spend weekends in the homes of friends. When all these things become songs, then we sit down and make an album.

-Are you still exercising your facet as a novelist?

I always like writing. It rests my voice when it gets tired from singing.

Photo: Theodore Xenos

Greek singer Kristi Stassinopoulou’s experiments at the roots produced a groundbreaking album which shot to No. 1 on the World Music Charts Europe. So Ian Anderson was amazed to hear that she hadn’t wanted it released.

It’s around two o’clock in the small hours of Saturday morning in the centre of Athens, and the skies have been dumping more rain on the city than England usually gets in a month of Novembers. Lightning is flashing, thunder is thundering, and in spite of my standing on the pavement, a small river is flowing over my new boots. Add to that the fact that Athens is being comprehensively dug up, re-modelled, re-routed and generally screwed around with in order to host the 2004 Olympics (memo to Ken Livingston: don’t even think about it!) and you’ll understand why traffic is totally gridlocked. My puny umbrella is singularly failing to keep the wrath of the gods off myself or my Athens education consultant Thalia Iakovidou, manager of Greek roots gal-of-the-moment Kristi Stassinopoulou, and getting a taxi anywhere is clearly a non-starter. Things, as they so charmingly say, can only get better – meanwhile, these boots were made for wading…

And get better they do. Later that day, still gently steaming and squelching, I’m transported to the spacious flat-cum-studio occupied by Stassinopoulou and her musical/life partner Stathis Kalyviotis for a fascinating, stimulating discussion about the evolution of her music, her career, and the process that led to The Secrets Of The Rocks. The latter, if you missed my rave review in fR234, its track on fRoots No.20 or the way that it hurtled to No.1 on the World Music Charts Europe just before Christmas, is one of the best European roots albums around right now. In her surprisingly lengthy career, Kristi Stassinopoulou has just accomplished what we in rootsbiz know as ‘doing an Emmylou’ – radically jumping her music forward in a new, distinctive, original and inventive manner at a point when many artists might coast, wind down or comprehensively lose the plot.

Kristi is gentle, relaxed and personable which initially disguises what turns out to be a sharp intellect. She speaks fluent and articulate English, delivering her thoughts carefully, almost poetically as she describes a musical lifetime that is hardly a normal one for someone you’ll find in the pages of fRoots. It’s a strange old path that leads anybody from playing a lead role in Jesus Christ Superstar and representing your country in the Eurovision Song Contest to making challenging contemporary roots albums, though we’re reminded that the latter jump was indeed made once before by the late Ofra Haza. And somewhere in there was an obvious influence from musics and lifestyles of the hippy era, which she is obviously too young to have been involved in at its peak. So we drink some wine, watch the sun set across Athens from their big picture window and let the story unwind…

“Musically speaking, my first thing was Greek Byzantine music, church music. I grew up in Athens, in a conservative Greek Orthodox family. I was spending many months as a child in my father’s homeland, in a small town called Kalamáta, which is the most southern town of the Greek peninsula. And the strange thing about Kalamáta, which is a port, right up from Africa, is that you can listen to all the radio programmes from the Mediterranean Sea there. The sea has no mountains so the radio waves come very easily. It is a receiving antenna. It’s the edge of Europe, actually. So I was listening to the Jajoukas – you know, the pipes that the Rolling Stones discovered? Oum Kalsoum, I knew her far, far before the name Oum Kalsoum was widely well-known as a world music artist. Anyway, I was acquainted with the sound of this music, Turkish music and also Balkan music.”

Photo: Theodore Xenos

“Kalamáta was one of the first areas of Greece where young tourists of the hippy generation would start coming and camping freely and living naturally next to the sea. They were a very, very different image in my eyes, seeing them coming to the hometown of my father, in the conservative Kalamáta. To suddenly see these colourful young people with long hair and guitars… they were like idols to me. I think that this is one of the reasons why later, when I became a teenager and in my 20s, I was listening to rock and psychedelic music and everything that was coming from the West, that was not yet accepted in Greece, and not widely heard. There were just a few very underground places where you could buy the albums of Velvet Underground, or Jefferson Airplane.

“As a child, we were living in a typical Athenian classical old house where they had marble stairs to get to the first floor and they had very nice reverb. First of all I was imitating all the rock singers of that time; Nico, Grace Slick, Patti Smith later. At the same time I was trying to imitate the voices of the Byzantine church because they had the same reverb in the churches. So I liked to improvise and experiment with the sound of the voice in the various places of the house, or the mountains sometimes.”

“I was playing with bands in high school, playing all this stuff. At the same time I was studying music and also trying to listen as much as possible to Greek traditional music which I loved. That was the time of the Greek junta, and unfortunately Greek traditional music had been used as a means of nationalist propaganda, and this made a large amount of people, mainly the people of the left, against traditional music. So I was afraid to even admit that I loved traditional music, because they would say ‘you’re nationalistic’. No, I’ve nothing to do with that. I hate that. It’s just the music that I love.”

“Practically my first job was when I was very young and I was selected in audition to play the role of Mary Magdalen in the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. There was an article in the newspaper asking for any amateur or professional actor or singer or musician that would like to come and audition. And I went there, and I sang the song of Mary Magdalen and they immediately said: ‘OK, we have Mary Magdalen, that’s her’. And this is how, let’s say, my profession started. This is how I earned the first money I ever earned in my life. Of course, after a few months I couldn’t stand the situation in the Greek music theatre, so I left. I quit and I started playing in various small clubs, at that time singing traditional Greek songs, ballads…”

Photo: Theodore Xenos

“There were one or two very underground clubs at the time in Athens. One was called Tipoúkitos, and that was the first place where I ever played. They were working for one month and then the police would close it . So I left that big famous theatre and I went to this club and that is how my path through all these small underground clubs in Athens started. I’m talking about ’79 now, I was very young, and at that place I was just performing with my guitar or one or two guitars. It was more acoustic, the sound.”

In 1983 came Eurovision. How did that happen?

“The person who had chosen me for the role of Mary Magdalen, the musical director who had done the arrangements for Jesus Christ Superstar, was a very famous middle-aged Greek musician whom everybody respects. He wanted to send a song to Eurovision and he asked me to sing the demo, but the demo was chosen as the song and so I went. At the same time, I liked the fact that I would travel freely to a European country, to Germany. One thing I remember was that Ofra Haza was playing with an Israeli band, before she had made her career.”

“I also worked in a very big and famous production next to the Greek star Alíki Vougioukáki, like Brigitte Bardot would be in France. She made the big production of Evita years later. There I played Perón’s mistress. At the same time I was performing with some completely unknown musicians in very small clubs, under the name of a band so people wouldn’t realise, and I was doing a completely different thing. The moment when I started to do exactly and only what I wanted to concentrate on was in the ’90s, especially when I met Stathis.”

Stathis was a punk rocker. To this day he still wears a saz like Joe Strummer wore a Telecaster. What inspired that?

“It was The Ramones in ’78, ’79,” confides Stathis, who is mostly the silent partner throughout the interview. “I was listening to all kinds of music. From 12 I was listening to rock music, before 12 I was listening to rembetica, and suddenly I heard The Ramones. It was the time when I was bored with listening to all the rock. It was predictable.”

“We met in Án Club which was the most underground rock club in the Exárchia area of Athens,” remembers Kristi. “Exárchia area was where there were the punk groups and the outlaws and things like that and we met one night when I was playing, with another band that I had, doing covers of the Pretenders, Blondie, Kate Bush, and also some traditional Greek songs with strange anarchist, more rock arrangements. And that’s when we met and we started to play music together. We formed a group called Selána. That’s one of those groups where you have four musicians who are thrown together as if God has planned it, if we believe in God, and he just decided that ‘this man would fit with that one, and this one would fit with that girl, and let’s put them together and see what happens.’ And we got together and started playing and it was the first time in the life of all four of us that you wouldn’t tell the others ‘could you play that’ because they were playing what you were imagining.”

Photo: Yannis Voulparakis

Selána never recorded but were minor legends on the club circuit.

“At that time,” points out Kristi, “and there still is, a distinction between commercial music and underground music and traditional music. In commercial music at that time, you wouldn’t dare play such strong sounds as we did. The indie groups were singing in English. If you dared sing in Greek they would say that you just wanted to make money, even if you sang about dying or something. Whatever the lyrics were, whatever the music was, for them you were then very commercial so you wouldn’t dare use Greek elements.”

“Nobody from the big multinationals in Greece wanted to release Ifantókosmos. In the end we made the album and it was a kind of hit with the alternative audience, which could be of any age but is just listening to more experimental things and not what you can hear every day on the radio in Greece. At that time Ifantókosmos was very well accepted by these people. Actually, it gave us the chance to be able to talk with bigger labels, to be able to have our own terms. It made us somehow more commercial, but in a good sense.”

1999′s Echotropia followed, making their first dent in the World Music Charts Europe and with widening international ripples that included North American release and touring. Musically, it hinted at the path that would lead to The Secrets Of The Rocks. And with this latest album, the couple have become a really creative machine, somehow finding that elusive alchemist’s stone which allows them to create modern music that has global technological influences yet remains true to their roots, indisputably Greek in a modern world. Indeed, I suggest that they’re probably now more part of a global community of artists than a local one. Ears are opening everywhere as the world gets smaller, but their kindred spirits are in the musical anti-globalisation movement against the stuff that’s pushed by the multinational companies.

“You just expressed in very good English, better than ours, our feeling towards what we are doing and what is happening in music today,” confirms Kristi. “It’s exactly this. We can’t go on just listening to what has been produced in Anglo-Saxony, the big multinationals. It’s impossible. Why? Why should this happen?”

“There is a whole ideological part behind the term world music and what all these artists are doing nowadays,” says Kristi. “It happened simultaneously in many areas, without the artists themselves having intended it or communicated. But this is not the first time that this has happened, and this is strange. This might have to do with astrology or the flow of energy around the planet. During the ’60s there wasn’t this world music thing going on but there was a certain period where all around the world you would have the arts flourishing in their own ways.”

“But anyway, apart from the ideological and the social parts of it, it’s fun. For me it is so much fun to discover music from around the world and to even try to do music or to use elements of music from around the world because this makes you travel as a musician. It gives you the feeling of travelling, because I believe that through music you can see the whole landscape around you. You can even feel the weather if you listen to the music, the way they sing. You can even feel the amount of humidity in the air of each country or how strong the winds blow there if you listen to the music.”

I wonder if, given their comments about the conservative attitudes to music prevalent in Greece, and thinking of the similar experiences of artists from other countries, they might have to achieve success abroad to make audiences at home really sit up and take notice.

“I don’t know. It happens to a lot of people. I don’t care that much. I mean, what I want to do is to have the ability first to communicate with people and be able to play the music I like to play, and the only reason why I would somehow struggle, or try or work hard to ‘get recognised’ is to get better conditions in our live performance. To have better sound; to be able to spend more time in the studio. This is what I care about. I don’t care about going out in the streets in Athens and people recognising me. Really, I don’t care about that. I’m not sure that the big audience in Greece will ever be interested in the music that I am making. I am very realistic about it. What I would like is that people really get the messages that come out from the music and the lyrics, and that they like it and they recognise this thing because of what it is.”

“We started by saying we were going to create something very strange and unpredictable, but when we finished the album we were not satisfied by that. I think that we didn’t achieve the 100 percent that we wanted. And this will come in the next album. None of them up to now has achieved the feeling that we have in our minds. This is what we are trying to do. I hope that we won’t get 100 years old trying to achieve it in the end. We are always very much amazed when people like it…” And this, remember, was before it had hit No.1 on the World Music Charts Europe in December, which must have completely flummoxed them.

“We don’t believe it. I mean it. When we finished the mastering of this album we were both in a melancholy state. We quarrelled with Thalia because we said we didn’t want to release it. I was getting crazy. I said: ‘Let’s disappear from the world. I don’t want this album to go out.’ And she’s saying: ‘But why do you always say you don’t like it? It’s so good.’”

Stunned by this turn of opinion on one of my favourite albums of the year, I am temporarily bewildered. Can this be a Ry Cooder moment? I think I’d better change the subject, and ask if their encounters with other musicians on the global world music scene have thrown up any desires for collaborations. Yes indeed…

“First it was the Schäll Sick Brass Band from Germany, and it happened. It was so funny. And the Italians at Womex. And with Rory McLeod, I would like to co-operate with Rory. And then I would like to meet once in my life and maybe even co-operate with Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz. They are a couple that I had been listening to from the end of the ’80s. I’ve never met them in festivals, it’s just their records. And many of the Indian musicians that we have met.”

“When you play with musicians or with singers from other countries,” considers Stathis, “it’s not only the similarities that we have in common, but it’s the differences which I like. I really felt it when we played with an Italian group in Canada. We were playing a traditional song and suddenly we heard something that we wouldn’t have imagined to put there, and it fitted so good.”

“I do hate this very strict attitude that traditional musicians have, especially in Greece, and I hear also elsewhere, that they don’t want to touch it and to change it. But, let’s make a point for them. There is a kind of rightness behind this idea, like for example there are some things that you can do and some other things that you cannot do because it is narrowing the richness of the tradition; the use of smaller tones in Byzantine music and singing, is something that was destroyed and disappeared. This is an element that should be kept. It widens the ability of the ear to hear. So let’s not mix, let us say, Byzantine music with rock instruments that would destroy some of the elements that are its value. In that part, those people that are very severe have a point. I am for the other side, of course…”

“The music is ours anyway, but to tell you something else, in none of these albums were we ‘heading towards’ something. I mean there was never an intention behind us to use this part of the tradition or use this part of rock, it’s just coming out of this thing that you have in your mind, and there it is, the tradition. It’s not an intentional thing. It’s not a decision that we make and we follow it. And we really don’t know how what we will do will sound next time.”

Stathis gets out a slide projector and shows some images from their many visits to the Greek islands which inspired the new record.

“It’s an experience that has to do with living by the sea, freely, naturally, being nude all day, living with very few things, just some water and fruit, and the shadow. This is somehow the thing that I want to get across to people – I am talking about the lyrics now, how it started. At the same time, Stathis was playing the tunes that we later produced here. This trance situation that you have when you are living near nature, but especially the very minimal nature that you get in some areas of the Cycladic islands or the south of Greece, where there are no trees, there are few plants, there are rocks and the sea. There are goats and lizards – they are both my very good friends. The sounds of such a place is what we wanted to create with this album. The Secrets Of The Rocks is not a surrealistic term, it’s very realistic. If you fall asleep at night on a rocky beach with pebbles, and the wind changes so often during the night so the waves are smaller or bigger, you get a kind of crazy sound of whispers, hints, laughters, steps. You have all sorts of different sounds that even frighten you sometimes. And this creates another world. This is the world that we try to reproduce. You become very sensitive to sounds when you live without electricity and without cars around you. I believe that what is very much more important than just listening to the music that is being released, is to be able to listen to the music which is happening around you every moment.”

Whatever their production secret is, there are quite a few other people who have tried to sample environmental sounds on records, and have ended up coming over as just extremely pretentious. On The Secrets Of The Rocks, these elements integrate so well and contribute to the record having an overall ambience, feeling like a complete work. Water, rocks, the whispering wind, the engines of the old Greek kaïkia fishing boats adding an industrial element as a loop. Perhaps they’re the glue that holds all the tracks together, the blood that runs through its veins…

“It’s not accidental that it reminds you of the blood, because there’s a whole community of people that live this way in Greece, a small community mainly of young people, and there is a connection between them. There is a common way of living. There is a belief that these places should be left free. Tourism sometimes becomes very bad for Greece.”

“Attracting people that get moved by such a sound is a good thing. Such people were attracted by Kalamáta back in the ’60s. That was part of the hippy movement at the time. These are good movements, I believe. But most of the Greek areas that are like we describe in the album have now become like Goa, unfortunately. And this is the social message that I would love to communicate through these songs: that the places should be left like that. We should care about these places and leave their beauty as it is, not try to make it more beautiful in our own terms.”

The conversation diverts into a discussion about how her lyrics are very impressionistic, painting with words. I’m sure that when she is singing them her head must be filled with pictures. I advance my theory about how you can tell whether a singer has a picture in their head – be it a single still image of a place or a person, or a whole film where the song has a story to tell. Some singers transmit the picture, others you can tell are just making noises with their mouths, concentrating on the sound rather than the soul.

“Everybody can tell that. The audience is so wise. They have a link with you. For years I was performing almost every night in different places in small clubs and with bad conditions all the time, because I was never a mainstream artist. But whenever I had the image in my mind while I was singing, the audience was like in a mystical dream, they were with me. But a part of the joy also for a singer, is to listen to the sound that you can produce with your voice and change it and make people feel the vibrations of the sound. This is also a nice thing. When it’s done mechanically, it’s horrible, and when it’s done egotistically it’s horrible. But when it’s done artistically, it’s like when you cook – when you put in a little more breathing, or a little less breathing, it’s also a joy that can help you concentrate on the image. The most important thing for a singer is to have both included in one.”

“When we were in Montreal last summer, we were invited by a professor of comparative religion to his lecture, to talk to his students and answer their questions. A month before he had given his students an examination and had made them listen to Echotropia without telling them who the artists were, where they came from, what the album was. He gave them four songs from Echotropia and one from Ifantókosmos and they had to listen, and then write small essays of one paragraph about what feelings they got from the songs. And then after he read all these small essays to everybody, he revealed that these were artists from Greece.”

“The small paragraphs that the students had written were the nicest things about our music that I have heard in my life. They really made us feel so moved. And the funny and very interesting thing is that they had understood most of the lyrics. In some cases they even had the same word! He had made them listen to the song Pyretos - Fever, fromIfantókosmos, and the guy had written, a young student of 18 years old: ‘It’s like Jimi Hendrix is jamming with Moroccan musicians, and the Moroccan singer is singing about a snake embracing her.’ And that was Stathis and me and I was singing the lyrics ‘you are embracing me like a snake.’ Another song was Anixandário, and someone had written: ‘This looks like a religious hymn’ – and it is based on a Byzantine hymn. The title of the song is a Byzantine word, it’s not used in the common Greek language. So he had written: ‘This is a religious song and I feel that this type of singing must have been made by the Sirens while Odysseus was passing by. This must have been how the songs of the Sirens sounded. It must be Greek.’ He had never heard the Greek language. We were very interested in that. So I feel that people don’t understand the lyrics word by word, but in some cases – not all the time – they get the feeling of the song which is really describing the lyrics in a way.”

And that, I conclude, might just be Kristi Stassinopoulou’s very special talent – and a useful one to have in this shrinking world of babel.

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