VITAL Veliotis is a cello player from Athens, Greece, and actively involved in the new music scene there. His CD Radial is a recording of Veliotis playing his cello without overdubs or editing. There are three parts of sound and four parts of silence, all making up this work. The piece is extremely minimal: the first sound part is a dense tone being played swiftly and without pause. The duration is over twelve minutes and this gives the part its strength, toghether with the frantic playing. The second sound part is again very minimal, but the atmosphere is totally different from the first, very gentle and soft. The third sound part is somewhere in the middle of the former two, but has a lightness that the other two lack. It says on the cover that random play is encouraged and I can actually imagine this having a good effect. It would certainly shuffle moods as well. In all its bleakness, this work is so strong and forceful that one will have to surrender to it completely or probably throw it out right away. There seems to be no middle ground here. As the reader may have noticed I surrendered and thoroughly enjoyed this work. Very well done. (MR) Veliotis runs 2:13, an improvised and experimental music club in Athens. As a cellist he has interpreted works by composers including Cardew and Xenakis, and his improvising associates have included trombonist Radu Malfatti, saxophonist John Butcher and harpist Rhodri Davies. Made in June 2003, Radial is a three part solo work, where sustained cello sounds are interspersed with brief interludes of silence. Veliotis used an acoustic instrument and no overdubs, but the resultant piece has layered depth and strange sonorities that suggest careful arrangement and calculated effect. Wood and bowed metal are shrouded in booming feedback-like resonance, timbres suggesting electronics and the audible beating of clustered overtones. The three non-silent parts of Radial are overtly static atmospheres with a busy interior life.
Three pieces for solo cello pillowed between four silences. Previously unknown to me, this disc from Nikos Veliotis came as a very pleasant surprise. The accompanying fact sheet says the works were performed without overdub or editing (and, presumably, without any post-production enhancement); if so, the layers of detail Veliotis manages to extract from his instrument are rather extraordinary and generally quite beautiful. All of the pieces are essentially drones and each remains in its own territory for the duration but within that, there's a wealth of tiny variation and even some almost naturalistic evocation of mood and place. He tends to weave at least three strands simultaneously. On the second track (my favorite), for instance, there's a slightly rattling high pitch that's rather reminiscent of air being blown through a flute or other metal tube, a medium range hum and a subaqueous moan that one might expect to hear issuing from a melancholy, ruminating whale. A certain kinship to some aspects of Gavin Bryar's “The Sinking of the Titanic” is felt. Veliotis works this narrow but rich field for 20 minutes and never once did my interest flag. It was as though there was always something else to be perceived, always a slightly different angle of hearing that would reveal more. The final piece seesaws back and forth in sighing fashion between two clouds of adjacent chords, sounding weary and resigned, yet comfortable. Veliotis apparently conceives of the alternating sound and silence tracks in a structural sense and perhaps it works somewhat although, in the end, I could do without the silences (measuring, I suppose for a reason, 0:47, 3:00, 4:48 and 0:54 in that order). Quibbles aside, “Radial” is highly enjoyable and a surprising direction for someone who's worked with the likes of Malfatti, Durrant, Davies, Beins and Wastell. Good stuff. Nikos Veliotis uses his cello without overdubs to break long minutes of silence with longer, muffled "manual" drones. "Radial" is one of those records I like calling "Sunday afternoon winter music": it's perfect in those grey cold days when you just want to stare out of the window, a painkiller for your confused or aching head. Nikos resorts to this silence/sound alternance like he wanted to allow us some concentration before listening, almost like in an oriental ritual ceremony. His looping cello makes for a compact mass of altered static harmonies, never scattered around yet always with a touch of difference shifting your attention when you're in full immersion. This is the most valuable aspect of a record that, imbued with deep knowledge, throws a bright light of beauty upon a lot of unanswered questions, especially in the first and third movements. But for me, the real magic is part 2: a dissonant, low register mantric slow current just imposing its presence in yourself.
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