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.
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. 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”)? The album starts with the sound of a boat and the voice of a captain. 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. 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. How did you come up with the name of the album? What does it mean to you? 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. Using the live looping technique Stathis is creating this psychedelic but with a traditional texture “wall of sound”. KRISTI: This is our first album with just the two of us as playing as a duet. 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.
In the Greekadelia recordings we had a “less is more” ideology. It was one of those rare “magic” moments and since then we go on like this. 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 the last think we ever expected, especially because we were always singing in Greek. This international appeal was something that really took us by surprise. 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. 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. That feeling that we were getting when listening to old recordings was not there anymore. Our ideology was -and still is- that something very important was lost in modern Greek music. 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. We played like that for around two years. STATHIS: …Together with two other musicians we created a garage-punk-rembetiko-traditional band. KRISTI: In that legendary rock club called AN in the area of Exarhia in Athens… First of all, could you tell me about how you first started to work together musically and how you came to develop the sound you have on Greekadelia?
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