Released as a CD by Iamvos, May 18, 1994
Reissued as a double LP by Heat Crimes & Untag, Jun 30, 2023
Four untitled tracks
Contributors (in order of appearance):
Konstantinos Karagounis, qanun; Costis Drygianakis, sound processing; Sokratis Sinopoulos, politiki lyra; Stathis Theocharakis, keyboards; Christos Foulias, percussion; Dimitris Papagiannis, percussion; Kostas Tsianos, voice; Kostas Pandopoulos, guitar; Yiannis Seitos, guitar; Christos Papoulakos, tenor sax;
Ross Daly, Cretan lyra; Dimitris Yiagas, voice; plus members of the Children Choir of the Municipal Conservatory of Karditsa, conducted by Vangelis Tantos.
Crafted in Graffiti studio, Larissa, Greece, between October 1990 and January 1994. Cover drawing by Christina Nakou, originally processed by Kostas Paliodimos and Giorgos Tzamtzis.
LP available at bandcamp
Nikos Diamantopoulos for the Greek magazine Audio, Oct. 1995
Frans de Waard for Vital Weekly i. 66
OPTICAL MUSIC – VOLUME 2 (CD by Iamvos)
A CD that opens with traditional Greek music, but that after a minute or so fades in sampled drumming and more traditional instruments. There is stringed instruments and tablas. A voice recites a few lines, alledegly in ‘inuit’. The second piece opens with soft tinkling piano’s and synth lines, almost in new age style. Then after 8 minutes or so, string (guitar?) sounds are added. There is a hugh crescendo after 15 minutes. Hughly reverbeted string sounds open the third track, which turns into the most abstract piece. The final piece opens with a reading of Psalm 103, including church bells with a lot of weird sounds underneath. You may guessed it right: this is a strange album of traditional music (a lot of which were sampled from records, including from countries such as Japan, Tibet, Burundi, China). The religious connotations are not very clear to me. This is a certain trance like thing in this record which is fascinating, and which certainly appeal to those who like, say Rapoon or Zoviet France, even though Optical Music stays in more traditional terrain.
Spenser Tomson on the LP re-issue for The Wire magazine, Oct. 2023
Active since 1984, Greek born composer and producer Costis Drygianakis’s more recent projects have included collaborations with artist Matt Atkins (Late April, 2020) and Russian band Duso (Dog House On A Tree, 2021). However, his earliest work was with Optiki Mousiki (Optical Musics) – a loose collective which included musicians and improvisors such as Konstantinos Karagounis and Ross Daly. Optiki Mousiki were active during two main periods. During their initial spell from 1984–87, they produced several pieces, the most notable of which was Tomos 1. That set blended the cool atonality of musique concrète with the warming glow of traditional musics, incorporating snippets of instrumentation which resemble the Greek dionysiakos dancing through its heady mixture. Tomos 2 dates from their second period of activity from 1990–94, where the aesthetic broadened to include a wider range of sounds and folk traditions, reflecting the personal journey taken by Drygianakis. As he pondered the purpose and meaning of avant garde music, he began to incorporate this broader range of influences and sources, the result of which is a much more expansive, almost cosmic sound. Of its four pieces, “01” is the most intoxicating, placing a honey voiced vocal towards the climax of a slowly tightening Sufi-like drone. The words are piercing and steady like the patter of a stage hypnotist willing you deeper into the illusion, and similar snippets are scattered throughout. However, the remaining three tracks are less intense, allowing air to circulate between each patch of drone or dazzle of strings. The album closes with “4”, the shortest but also most affecting of the suite. Choral voices return but, shrouded in angular drone and flanked by occasional irregular piano tinkle, the piece refines the concrete/traditional blend of Tomos 2 into something which feels more weighty and vast. It’s effective and, actually, the work of Drygianakis doesn’t get the attention it deserves; there’s bit of Xenakis in there, but not really; the impressionistic scale of Vangelis, a little bit but, again, not really. Hopefully this reissue – a collaboration between Heat Crimes and Untag – will mean that more people explore a cruelly overlooked body of work.