U49 | YIORGIS SAKELLARIOU | in Aulis
in Aulis_excerpt1
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format : CD ltd to 200 hand numbered copies
all copies come with an additional art card on 300gr satin paper
release year : 2018
length : 42’54
track : in Aulis
status : still available
>>> order via Paypal : chalkdc@unfathomless.net
(Belgium) : 14 € (inc.postage)
(Europe) : 15 € (inc.postage)
(World) : 16 € (inc.postage)
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: info :
Sacrifice
In June 2015 I was invited by Implode, an artistic platform dedicated to new forms of sound and visual arts, to participate in “Sonic Topographies”, an artist residency that focused on locations of major importance in Ancient Greek history. I worked at the ruins of the temple of Artemis in Aulis, an archaeological site closely related to religious history and sacrificial rituals, and responded artistically to the location by composing In Aulis.
The composition explores the connection between myth, sacrifice and music and is inspired by the historical and religious background of Aulis and the temple of Artemis. According to the myth, the Greek fleet gathered in Aulis to set off for Troy and force the return of Helen. While there, king Agamemnon killed a stag that was sacred to goddess Artemis. The enraged deity ceased all winds, thus preventing the ships from sailing. This eventually led the Greeks to agree in sacrificing Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigeneia, in order to propitiate Artemis and ensure a favourable wind for their fleet. At the very last moment the goddess felt compassion for Iphigeneia and replaced her with a stag which was killed instead of the girl.
Iphigeneia’s dramatic story is described by Euripides in his famous tragedy Iphigeneia in Aulis which he wrote in 406 BC. The play was written during a period of conflict, political turmoil and instability and it arguably functions as an allegory in which Euripides – exiled from Athens at that time – warns his fellow Athenians about the consequences of war and the thirst for power and dominance as well as the hypocrisy of military and political leaders.
Is there a connection between the sacrificial act and musical performance? How is sound utilized in ritualistic murders? In his book “Noise: The political economy of music”, Jacques Attali writes that “listening to music is to attend a ritual murder”. He explains that in the physical world a ritualistic murder purifies violence and in the sonic world music does a similar thing. As the story of the Greeks in Aulis shows, sacrifice is performed when a problem requires a radical solution; the wind must blow and Agamemnon’s guilt must be transformed into redemption. With sacrifice a tension leads to resolution. In music, as Attali argues, it is noise and dissonance that become harmony when the chaos of sounds is organized and put into order through the act of music-making, when a sonic condition of anxiety and alert is transformed into joy and exaltation.
Silence
There is not a sound from the birds
or the sea. The winds are hushed
and silence holds the strait of Euripus.
Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis, line 9-11
In these lines Agamemnon describes the sonic atmosphere of Aulis, an eerie silence caused by the absence of wind. For the Greeks, this stillness created discomfort as they were unable to mobilize and sail to Troy. Around 2,500 years after these lines were written, I was at the same location, attempting to listen to the echoes of myth and history resonating in the present-day soundscape of Aulis.
Nowadays there is little left of the ancient buildings. Only their ruins continue to remind the importance and history of Aulis. Any visitor can simply push aside a half-broken wire fence and enter the archaic holy grounds, lying between a highway and a local road leading to a disused cement factory. Walking through the flora that is gradually covering the ruins, one can witness the blending of nature with human-made constructions and the folding of the distant past with the modern era.
In praise of Artemis
In the core of the sacrificial act is the setting of relationships which expand from the world of gods, or the unseen and ethereal, to the world of humans, the rest of the society. Simultaneously, music making is a socially constructed activity that brings communities together. Euripides provides an insightful example of this. When Iphigeneia finally accepts her fate, she addresses the chorus and says:
And you, young
women, sing a propitious song for my fate, a song in praise
of Zeus’ daughter Artemis. Let the Greeks keep propitious
silence.
Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis, lines 1467-1470
These lines reveal that sound is utilized in sacrifice to bridge the divine with the human world. Through singing and listening, music is creating social bonds, manifests a divine presence and establishes a relationship with it.
Ultimately, the Sonic Topographies residency was not a mere study and collection of information about Aulis and the temple of Artemis but an empirical interaction that transmuted it from a field with abandoned ancient ruins to a space for action and contemplation. Field recording and composing was triggering an ongoing dialogue between myself and the explored environment and deepened my relationship with it on a physical and sentimental level. The research about the temple and the fieldwork at the ruins expanded from investigating its history and recording sounds for an electroacoustic composition to a contemplation on passing time and an exploration of the depths of human soul.
(Yiorgis Sakellariou, 23 August 2017)
: reviews :
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Since 2009, Daniel Crokaert’s Unfathomless label has been releasing music that, by and large, revolves around the nexus of field recordings and electronics. In one sense, you’re pretty sure of the general area to be explored when first slipping a new disc into the player. In another, he and the musicians tend to do an excellent job of exploring the vast amount of potential variation within such apparently restricted environs.
Yiorgis Sakellariou brought Aeolian harps to the site of the Greek temple of Artemis in Aulis, Greece, recording (and, I assume post-producing) their interaction with the wind, in the process picking up other ancillary sounds. That contrast, between the wooly, whistling, wind-borne atmospherics and the rougher (though always blurred) booms and bangs, forms the basic structure of the 43-minute piece. But there’s much more, many shifts in focus and mood, from quiet contemplation replete with crickets to dully roaring, grinding, somewhat threatening cycles ending with a sharp crash of glass. Subsidence, resurgence in different guise; there’s a wavelike effect throughout, relatively clear or detritus-filled, a fine combination of the natural and manmade. A very well thought-out effort, overall.
Brian Olewnick
Just Outside
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The Lithuanian-based composer made a pilgrimage to the Ancient Greek temple of Artemis in Aulis, Greece and this is what ensued. At first the extremely faintly audible granular rumble may have you immediately popping on a pair of headphones, but at about two minutes into this 43 minute singular composition a layer of drone accompanying a tectonic flicker starts to make its presence. Slow-going the constant jetstream wall becomes the canvas for manipulations that emulate opening a treasure chest in the belly of a pirate ship. The CD is hand-numbered in an edition of 200, and the Belgian label always does an incredible job under the watchful mastery of Daniel Crokaert, who also created the cover collage.
These in-situ outdoor recordings sound as if the composer is dragging large scale boulders into various chambers. Of course the temple he is entering is mostly ruins these days, but you’d swear there were a roof and four sides judging by the cavernous sound he’s concocted. He is most certainly infusing his own mythology atop this place of sacrifice and ritual. The watery lapping colors the space as a shifting harmonic tone illuminates the background like a moving flashlight spot.
A bit of a radio play among the broken facade and remaining columns, the sound that exudes from in between. With crackle and reduced sound effects Sakellariou remains at the micro level, sorting out his electronic synthesis on a charged stage with silences, and sudden actions. By fusing his field recordings with Aeolian harp, and layering the atonal drag of open air, what results in its wake is a blend of rustic and industrial noise that sounds like a heavy weight being dragged through a dusky windstorm, until the punctuation of glass breaking.
The place frames the sound space, and vice versa becomes informed by modern wo/man upon the Earth where so many have tread before. Having visited several historical spots in Italy recently, it’s a uniquely peculiar rush to feel the history under your feet when in such a place. As in Aulis comes into its final dozen minutes the granular nature of the experience comes into play with only a fine dust and vague drone apparent, like you’ve entered a ghost town – or in meditation. And Sakellariou builds on that with a cyclical minor beat that is raw and lo-fi, collaging corroded twists that sound like an old shed in a storm. There is never complete silence, and therein lies the main tension of this recording, the sheer presence of absence.
TJ Norris
Toneshift
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Brussels’ Unfathomless label continues to go from strength to strength with a pair of particularly strong releases. Yiorgis Sakellariou ventures off to the Temple of Artemis.
The lush atmosphere of Philip Sulidae’s Ramshead is balanced by the aridity of In Aulis, a single-track recording that links history, sacrifice and myth. Yiorgis Sakellariou has written an excellent essay about the genesis of the recording, which we encourage you to read on the release page. Ironically, the first sound we detect is silence, an intentional choice that implies the reaction to fallen kingdoms, the stilling of wind in the myth, or the world before creation. But as John Cage famously noted, there’s no such thing as silence; it’s all a matter of attuning to one’s environment. Sounds slowly begin to seep into the consciousness, the composition building in minute increments until one wonders if there were ever silence at all. Some of the sound may be due to the intrusion of the artist, a Catch-22 alluded to in the reference to noise as violence. There’s scraping and clunking about; is the temple being defiled or reconstructed? There’s no way to be certain. Sakellariou likens the composer’s role to tidying up: constructing a narrative out of chaos. Now that these sonic fragments have been sorted into glass and digital frames, are they sacrifices worthy of a goddess? And if so, might she break her own silence to respond? We hear no words, only hot, incriminating breath; and in the deluge that follows, even that is washed away.
Richard Allen
A Closer Listen
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No doubt it helps to know people. Over the years I met Yiorgis Sakellariou a couple of times (and still don’t know how to correctly pronounce his last name) and he is the ever enthusiast when it comes to working with field recordings and talking about it. He’s from Greece and via Lithuania he now lives in London. For his Unfathomless release he went back to the old country, the ancient one if you will and recorded sounds and Aeolian harps at the Greek temple of Artemis in Aulis, Greece. With that he composed a forty-three minute work of some refined dynamic beauty. It starts out very soft and it is not easy to tell what it is you are hearing, but that could be said of the entire work. Sakellariou is man to work with sounds a bit more than just layering them together. Be it the emphasis of frequencies or something more heavier when it comes to treatment, it all boils down to the way he composes his pieces. Various sounds are layered together, building towards a crescendo, with a radical cut at the end, and then he starts all over again, with a bit of dirt and sand here and there, but slowly adding sound event upon sound event. He does that a couple of times on ‘In Aulis’, with at one point a very surprising (and perhaps also a bit scary turning point through the addition of a last minute extra sound), and it brings a great additional tension to the piece, as well it forces the listener to pay extra close attention to the music. It is not something one can ignore; the quiet bits will be lost and the loud bits will be perceived as annoying loud (maybe!). The wind through these ancient forms, the rocks it is built upon, and the wind picking up dirt, it all becomes at a certain point almost melodic, which in this world is perhaps a rare thing (somewhere around the sixteen minute break that is), whereas after thirty-four minutes it is like a conveyer belt of industrial noise. And then along it can be as quiet as a church mouse (in a Greek temple), with just a bit of far away wind blowing through a single string. I couldn’t say if this is his best work so far, but I would surely rank it among his best releases. It is full of intense drama and of great beauty, abstract as it is.
Frans de Waard
Vital Weekly
Unfathomless 