Nyfida Sound Box

There is a Greek island called Lesbos, the island of an archaic poet, Sappho. In July 2021 Spyros Polychronopoulos and Jannis Anastasakis, moved most of their studio equipment and musical instruments to a small house next to the beach to record an album. The exact location the recordings took place was a house in an uninhabited village in the gulf of Kalloni called Nyfida. This house was where Spyros’s grandparents use to live. All the walls were covered by old pictures and embroideries made by them. This house affected how this music was made in very direct ways, in fact some of the sounds were made by using the props found in the premises: old materials such as parts of a loom, old sewing machines and more modern ones including a blender and a fridge all found their way into this recording. After the 2021 summer Spyros worked on the recordings for several weeks shaping the multichannel recordings to form this album. During this process the sounds with the embedded memories were reshaped and reimagined. This album is the product of the work in two contradictory environments a small beach village during summer and a sprawling city during winter.

This work found shelter at the record label Room40 and has been released in 12 July 2024 as an interactive sound box. This box, following Spyros Polychronopoulos’s release on the same label titled Live Electronic Music (2016), features knobs and a button allowing the listener to intervene in the execution of the musical material. Nyfida Sound Box is a versatile device inviting you, the listener, to challenge the enclosed composed material’s form and intended use in perpetuity.

This release brings together three artistic periods: before modernism, where from the invention of the phonograph onwards we can reproduce pre-recorded musical material; modernism, where the randomness of material execution is programmed by the artist; and post-modernism and beyond, where the choice for executing and shaping the work passes to the hands of the audience.