Synch, an open-minded summer music event, starts Friday at Technopolis
The two-day Synch Festival, one of the more open-minded events on the country’s musical agenda, returns Friday to its customary grounds of recent years, Technopolis (100 Pireos, Gazi, Athens, 8 p.m., presale tickets 38 euros, 45 euros at the gate, 25 euros for the OAED-registered unemployed, 65 euros for two-day tickets, tel 210.670.5700). The agenda once again features inquisitively natured acts, from luminaries to fringe figures. Highlights include Blixa Bargeld & Alva Noto and Matt Elliott, both on Day 1, and then Jimi Tenor will team up with Tony Allen on Saturday, along with a performance by Hot Chip. Elliott, a Bristol act of dark folk who has also worked under the alias Third Eye Foundation, his drum & bass artistic flip side, shared some thoughts in an e-mail interview with Kathimerini English Edition ahead of his solo set on Friday. Your projects have covered extraordinary musical ground. Going into each new territory, do you tend to have a clear picture or does one thing lead to another? I tend to have a vague idea and then let events happen, especially on the 3EF records. There is a lot more planning on the Matt Elliott records, but I still like to try to let fate have a hand or introduce random elements as much as possible. You’ve attributed the diversity of your work to a musical education gained while working at a record store and the owner’s vast musical knowledge. Small stores seem to be diminishing and struggling to survive. How major a loss do you feel this would be for the music community? Well, firstly, there seems to be a slight resurgence in vinyl, and there are more indie shops opening up for specialists. Whether this will be a long-term thing is yet to be seen. Of course, the old indie shops were a great place to meet, to discuss and discover music, but it was also sometimes frustrating because you couldn’t hear that one record you’d heard about because it was out of print or something. There are definitely pluses and minuses about the Internet. It’s certainly never been easier to discover music and musicians, especially the more underground artists. Also, I think as a result of the Internet, more and more people go to shows. It has basically changed the dynamic of the musician. But to answer the original point, hopefully the trend in these indie shops will continue because I think culturally they are a good thing and every town is better off with at least one. A new album as 3EF is set for release this year. Will it be a stylistic turnaround from the preceding Matt Elliott trilogy? Well, it is a 3EF album, so it is almost a continuation from «Little Lost Soul» [2000 release of diverse drum & bass ambience]. I’m currently recording a Matt Elliott record and I keep the two projects separate. It was interesting returning to 3EF after all these years, especially because the technology has moved on so much, but it was just as intense making the record as before.
