Tasos Stamou - Musique con Créte

by Raquel Pinheiro

Greek born, London living, thirty something years old Tasos Stamou, an electroacoustic music composer and performer, and creator of alternative electronic music instruments – he likes to bend circuits and to hack hardware, and is as much at ease modifying toys or Casio keyboards. Tasos is also a researcher of ancient, traditional music.

Musique con Créte, Stamou’s new record, and his first proper composition work, he tends to release live recorded one, is the result of an artist residency of four weeks, in Heraklion, Crete, that started three years ago, with a follow up during two subsequent Summers. Tasos idea was to explore the music of this part of Greece he had not visited before, and to reconnect with some parts of his Greek heritage.

Stamou collected field recording, both in nature and urban environment, hosted studio sessions with local musicians, got tapes and records from old record shops, improvised, dismantleded traditional songs, and assembled a complex multi-layered sound collage that revisits local traditional music, coupling it with electronic and acoustic fabrics.

The result is a complex, strange, fascinating, at times minimalistic, at times folklore, other times quasi, if not fully, spiritual, palette of sounds and textures. Some instrumental, others vocalized/sang.

Some of Musique con Créte’s tracks have both a personal and ethnographic relevance, like when Tasos was invited by a friend to attend a Koura ceremony for a closed group of people and was able capture a rare Rizitiko song.

The record is a good mix of ancient, ethnographic music and concrete music methods - loops, down sampling, effects processing etc., allowing the listener to dive into, what for most is certainly an unknown musical world, that of Crete’s traditional music. The above mentioned Rizitiko, Vasiliki, Ballad of the Crippled Gipsy fall under the more traditional/ethnographic group, while A Call, The Arrival, or A Dance bring the electroacoustic and concrete music to the forefront.

(Discrepant Records, 2018)