Elati, named after a mountain in the centre of Greece, is the second release of Giorgos Stefanou on Petcord and features everything the average man in the street would not associate with summer holiday music played in crammed tourist bars on the island of Crete. No tanned beach beauties concealing their tired eyes behind sunglasses and leaning against the grooved stems of palms, no guitar-playing strawhats dipping their feet in swimming-pool turquois liquids. Actually, most of the inspiration for Elati was conceived during the Winter season on Crete and does not specifically refer to any other locations at all. Instead, Elati seems to portrait being and nothingness from the inside, how a seemingly successful and popular person can still feel tired or even disgusted from meaningless social rituals.

At first there are thinly veiled, hardly discernable textures, which culminate to polyrhythmic percussive structured noise. Above hangs a cloud of glassy, shapeless tone clusters. Patches of oscillating mumble, scraping and pizzicato accents set by an extraterrestial string ensemble. Distance and proximity is willingly determined by Elati's acoustics and equally used as one musical parameter amongst others like pitch, length and dynamic. Heavily reverberated guitar fragments battle with chromatic amplitude modulations, interferences and looped field recordings in the foreground. A creeping, ascending tone sequence swells up and is unexpectedly interrupted by a slowly decaying, metallic bang and unleashes insane babble patches gradually morphing to harsh white noise as a furious final.

Giorgos Stefanou's Elati is an intriguing composition which unveils a great level of complexity despite its sparse and terse arrangements. Friends of regularly shaped sonic textures (aka. "sound design" or "laptop music") may be irritated by the continuous colour and tempo changes and its abrasive elements. It is building up sharp acoustic contrasts, tensions and room illusions to create a dense web of complex movements that eventually converge to more punctuated sequences. Features, that require concentrated listening, but reward the endeavour with 67 minutes of outstanding sonic sceneries comprised of flickering lights and shadows.

Olliver Wichmann

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Music © 2008 by Giorgos Stefanou and the Petcord netlabel.
Cover art © 2008 by Olliver Wichmann, Giorgos Stefanou and the Petcord netlabel.