SAVVAS METAXAS

Magnetic Loops II

“This album came as a result of a need to do things with a smaller more minimal set-up. After trying a few different configurations in the studio, my steps led me to the Revox A-77 tape machine. My first attempts were to use a stack of old tapes wth folk Dutch songs (that came with the Revox, since I bought it from Rotterdam) and cut loops out of them and then randomly play them back and manipulate them.

After doing this for a couple of days I found myself again in a position of wanting to reduce sounds and elements from these recordings. During a break from this process, I decided to record a tape loop with a slow sequencer from a synthesizer, just for fun and to clear my head. This is how the first track of this album was created. I spent an entire day listening back to this tape loop and by the end of the day I had given shape to the track by playing the same loop in a different speed and adding small bits of sound towards the end.

In the next few days, the initial project with the existing Dutch tapes drifted away, and I ended up creating the Magnetic Loops II album. (The first Magnetic Loops was released by Falt, France a year ago).”

—Savvas Metaxas, Thessaloniki, March 2022

For fans of meditative and looping drone works by William Basinski, Tu M’, Triac, Pinkcourtesyphone, and LINE’s recent release Nostalgia (circa 1987) by Miguel Angel Tolosa.

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Catalog:: LINE_128

Format:: digital

Edition:: open edition

Release:: June 2022

Tracklist:

pt.1 (25:36)
pt.2 (08:22)
pt.3 (07:12)

Recorded/Mixed by Savvas Metaxas
Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi
Cover photo by Savvas Metaxas

Savvas Metaxas is a Greek musician and sound artist who works in the fields of experimental music, field recordings, and modular synthesis.

Counting more that 15 releases among vinyls, CD’s and cassettes, his music has been released in multiple labels such as Granny Records, Glistening Examples, More Mars, Phinery, Superpang, Otomatik Muziek, Coherent States, Falt and has performed in numerous concerts hosted in experimental art spaces, museums, galleries and venues. His latest album, entitled “The Moral of the Parable is Plain” has been released in 2021 from ‘Sounds Againds Humanity”

In 2008 he co-founded the Granny Records label, focusing in publishing works by contemporary electronic musicians, moving in the range of free improvisation, noise, electroacoustic composition and contemporary electronica. Along with the operation of the label, he co-organized and co-curated events in various spaces in Thessaloniki inviting numerous European and Greek artists. Since 2021 he is co-running Dasa Tapes.

His other works contain the creation and composition of sound for installations and site- specific performances as well as music for short movies and contemporary dance, to name a few:

– Sound design for the animation movie ‘Tourist’ by Dimitris Simou
– Music for the dance performance ‘«Who knows where the time goes potential destination #1» by Eleonora Siarava
-‘Deep Waters’ . Sound design for a Video installation by Katerina Athanasopoulou at Primarola Festival (September 2020)
– ‘It Sings’ . Audio essay in collaboration with Eleni.Ikon at the Barbican, London.
– Sound design for the video ‘Her Voice’ exhibited as part of the Audint’s new installation works Unsound:Undead, at the Arebyte Gallery in London.
-‘Matter over Matter’. Sound installation at Goethe institut in Sofia and Thessaloniki.
– ‘The Guest Project, October’s draft’. Music for dance performance at Arceological Mueum of Thessaloniki.
– Sound composition and actor at the short movie “ Oi Agrioi” directed by Nikos Kostopoulos.
– “Out on the Inside”, sound installation at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall.

He has also collaborated with the Onassis Cultural Center under the European Project Interfaces giving interactive workshops to technical high-schools in order to introduce them creatively in the experimental electronic music.

savvasmetaxas.com

REVIEWS OF
Magnetic Loops II

Pleasant melodies’ stretched spectra revel in the imperfections of their medium. Hiccuping clicks and static hiss, warped curvatures, rattles. Echoes of themselves overlap, compound and amplify modulations to change character in series. One loop appears to rearrange its inner sequence as if it were pinched and twisted into a Möbius strip, as if the end had become the beginning. What sounds like knocks on the box and synth swells blend with skips and warps. Something remains the same but it’s never static.
—harmonicseries.substack.com
Engrossing, patiently evolving minimalism gleaned from experiments with a Revox A-77 tape machine by a mainstay of Thessaloniki and Greek avant garde—one for followers of Basinski, Machinefabriek, Kevin Drumm A must-check for fans of tape music’s inherent ferric wow and flutter and strange capacity for detuned overtones, Metaxas’ follow-up to his Superpang installment of ’21 yields a single meditative piece in three parts that revel in a certain, groggy state of mind. The recording is a product of the artist needing to make music with a more limited set-up, which lead him to the classic Revox A-77 tape machine, prized for its varispeed functionality and tactility. The process involved Metaxas cutting loops from a reel of Dutch folk songs that came with the machine (bought in Rotterdam) and feeling them out for a few days, eventually restituting them with a synth loops, and smudging the results together in de-pitched reiterations, as with his first volume of ‘Magnetic Loops’ for Falt in 2021. Surely not intended to be consumed while driving or operating heavy machinery, the music effortlessly lulls us into a hypnagogic headspace with the murmuring melodic cadence and spectral ephemera that stealthily reveals itself in Pt.1, while Pt.2 is given to some gorgeous wow and flutter whispering eight minutes of sweet nothings to our ears, and Pt.3 creates a cats cradle for your mind with its tattered ribbons of dashes and streaks on a cloudy canvas.
—boomkat.com
Savvas Metaxas has an innate skill in creating tactile, hypnotic pieces of music. Magnetic Loops II falls directly in this chasm where these sounds are suspended between two points breaking apart at the seams. Tape loops and electronic interference saturate the surrounding environment with dust, bringing a lucid focus to each repeating sonic element as it stretches and begins to fold in on itself. Starlight is buried underground, the glow trying to scratch through sedimentary layers. As each sculpted wave rises from unknown depths, pushing against gravity to find its place in the sky, the world cracks open.
—foxydigitalis.zone
It’s been a long time since I told you about my passion for magnetic tapes, right? Like two weeks with Ian William Craig? What else is there to say at this point? Well, a lot of things, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t bother writing a column, no matter how enjoyable the exercise. For once, it’s really been a while since I’ve talked about Line, Richard Chartier’s restrained label, which has meanwhile gone all-digital because of the misalignment of the stars for independent dairies. Too bad, but it would have really hurt to lose one of the spearheads of minimalist music that is paradoxically so stimulating for the imagination.

For some time, however, abstraction had reached a level that exceeded the limit of my attention, and although one cannot blame it on a sound artist whose business and trademark it is, I admit that I got lost. A controlled stylistic shift in Line’s artistic line has had its effect for some time, however, in a Room40-esque eclecticism which I suspect has had a good influence, since Pinkcourtesyphone has established its main base there for five years. In short, the house located in the City of Angels is enjoying a welcome new lease of life; and it is with Savvas Metaxas, Greek whose I only know the first Magnetic Loops from the French of Falt, that I detail it to you.

Beyond all that I tell you each time about the melancholic magic of magnetic tapes in sound creation, always perched between repeated instants and false eternity, there is necessarily a restraint in the method of composition that operates. One or two loops, an emeritus Revox tape recorder, probably a few limited effects, and of course the conductor’s vision of these unpredictable instruments. And this is where a form of ambivalence emerges, between a virtually iterative sound cycle and the natural distortion for which the fragile elements of the recording chain are responsible. Does minimalism then come originally from composition, from the limited number of creative vectors, or from the final product? And why not a variable proportion mixture of the three? The three pieces of Magnetic Loops II each seem to demonstrate one of these hypotheses.

The marathon runner Pt.1 will explore the progressive cuttings of repetition that tires with each pass over the Revox-A77 buds, taking the form of a misty, warm landscape in red and green tones, evolving so gently that the we end up wondering if our final vision was really so different from the initial one. Breaths, claudications and parasites for the essential seekers. Pt.2 will rather look for the responsibility of the musician in a loop drawing on the sound artifact more than the music; but isn’t that Line’s mission, editing in the name of sounds that shouldn’t even need words to describe and feel? A mirage passes, an echo comes back to us like the corrupted undertow of ocean waves on a volcanic beach. Then Pt.3 comes to merge the two actors of this dance of the elements, joining ideas and iron oxide thanks to a thin strip of plastic which turns endlessly on an imaginary circuit. Organic rhythmic outlines and other proto-melodies drowning in their own apoptosis seem to fight against the inescapable disintegration of their own world, with a track that without really saying it challenges Line’s minimalist limits, giving birth to a track that would not have not mismatched on Home Normal.

And here we come back to the initial question: where does minimalism come from? It is for me at the confluence of the musical creator and his vessel, one and the other can certainly approach it independently. But mathematically, an integer is the product of its root multiplied by itself, and if the two roots reveal themselves here well apart in Pt.1 and Pt.2, the evidence is that the association of the two in Pt. 3 takes you exactly where you dream of being: in the altered harmony that is worth more than the sum of its parts. And if Line persists in exploring this side of minimalism, a persistent second wind will undoubtedly emerge.
—tartinedecontrebasse.com (translated from French)

SAVVAS METAXAS

Tracklist:

REVIEWS OF Magnetic Loops II

REVIEWS OF
Magnetic Loops II