A text about the performance by Alkino Ioannidis......
I was asked to describe in a short text what we live as a musical group. Our lives are not particularly interesting. But we are on a journey, and the journey always has something to tell: We started recording in some basement and ended up walking around the Earth for three years.
This constant transition from inside to outside, from closed to open, from depth to height and from the solitary moment to the collective experience, characterizes our life and our art. When everything around is dark and cold, you look for the warmth that the light of a fellow human being gives. You seek to be mirrored, to see who you are, if you are. Song, from our first day on earth, acts as an identity, a cohesive force, a condensation of feelings and information, an opening to the invisible, an existential channel. "From soul to soul".
Thus, the concerts in the last few difficult years have acquired a new dynamic. There is a genuine, mutual joy in meeting the audience. Energy, concentration, communication, comfort, politeness, everyone's participation in something common. There is an awareness that we are living something precious together, something far beyond the sounds and words we sing. It is as if we are whispering, behind the sounds and lyrics, another, secret text that defines us personally and collectively.
The ensemble consists of great musicians who love and respect their art and practice it with dedication, joy, sacrifice and passion. They are Giorgos Kaloudis on cello and Cretan lyre, Manolis Pappos on three-string bouzouki and lute, Fotis Siotas, who alternates with Dimitris Hadjizisis on violin and Dimitris Tsekouras on double bass.
I love and admire them immensely! Each one of them is an aesthetically complete world. They offer it, creating together our special, common aesthetic. We use exclusively stringed instruments. Every silence and every howl comes from our touch on the strings, without the confidence or convenience that other instruments bring to a band.
The result is refined and primitive, refined and hard, structured and free. It changes day by day and constantly reveals new paths to us. These paths are the ones that sound engineers Vangelis Lappas and Vassilis Drougas, and the illuminator - organic farmer Konstantinos Margas are called upon to process and convey to the ears and eyes of the listeners. We believe in singing.
Today, after we all, creators, performers and listeners, have managed to identify it with our worst self, with the neo-pluralism, the megalomania and the miserable aristocracy of the past years, as well as with the impotence of our present, now that we all call it uninspired and uninspired, after we have blamed it for all our ills, now we return to it and ask it to show us who we are. It shows us exactly who we are, so we call our song names. And it doesn't hate us, and it still bears the poor thing mirroring us... All this time, facing the difficulties, happily paying the price and gaining much joy, we have been dealing exclusively with the artistic part of what we do. Without any discount, without any tricks, without any other concern than the constant deepening of what we share with our listeners. Because that's how our existence becomes meaningful. It makes sense whenever the bouzouki, stripped of the symbolism of the last decades, hums the heavens again.
So the lyre, free from the violence of the tourist feast, sings the sound of the centuries. Whenever the bows, escaping from the tepidity of the accompanying "soup", from the academic, funereal finery and from the jubilance of showmanship, bleed two notes with soul. Whenever a guitar and a voice, with mistakes and falsetto, try to spell out dream and reality in an inseparable way. So that's what we struggle with, unfortunately not always successfully, regressing from creation to destruction.
I cannot guarantee that you will have a good time if you honour us with your presence. Because, fortunately, all bets are off.
Thank you, Alkinoos Ioannidis
Opening of summer events of the Municipality of Heraklion
Saturday 08 July at 21:30 at the Garden Theatre "Nikos Kazantzakis"
Ticket prices: 12 euro Pre-sale - 14 euro at the entrance
Pre-sale: Garden Theatre "N. "N. Kazantzakis" - Androgeo 2 - Eleftheroudakis - Cristi Academy
Organised by Cretanart Productions