"Rather than seeking the solidity of a central truth, or clinging to our daily schedule, this frenetic yet meticulous piece turns intention into a fluid and reactive force, accepting happenstance and working with it. Mistakes and deviations don't sabotage our aims; they merely invite us to reshape them." Jack Chuter for ATTN MAG.
www.attnmagazine.co.uk/review-savvas-metaxas-for-how-read-now/
Featured on Late Junction BBC Radio 3
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For How Read Now begins with the sounds of two boiling eggs Savvas Metaxas prepared one sunny Sunday, followed by recordings of a trip to a park. From here our journey turns strange, with Metaxas overlaying this beginning using the sounds he could make from objects he found in his studio: small rocks, pencils, paint brushes and little metallic toys. From these modest starting points, he, over the course of 25 minutes, delivers an exercise in restrained ambiguity, a gentle probing of possibilities and questions with no firm resolutions on the horizon at all.
"The title is an error in print (errata) found in Zygmunt Bauman’s book Modernity and its Ambivalence," explains Metaxas. "It's striking how such a small mistake can change the meaning of things and shape ideas, not necessarily in a bad way but in a way that gives a whole new direction and perception, making the mistake itself suddenly feel right."
The inspiration for such an approach itself feels 'suddenly right' given Bauman's book is a call to reconcile ourselves to ambivalence and ambiguity, as a state intrinsic to contemporary life. Here Metaxas takes a more minor key approach to these ideas investigating them firmly within the context of musique concrete where as he puts it: "Small mistakes and alterations of an original idea, give new shape to sound and composition."
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Savvas Metaxas is a musician and sound artist who works in the fields of experimental music, field recordings, modular synthesis. He is based in Greece. For more:
www.savvasmetaxas.com
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FLP119
released August 26, 2022