Extraordinary Athenian Primitive visionary Christos Chondropoulos unleashes wildly imaginative hybrids of black metal folk, Orcish industrial and AI-enhanced microtonal dancehall.
Among the most thrilling, distinctive musicians to emerge over the past decade, Christos Chondropoulos’ uchronic take on bygone Greek folk modes, spliced with techgnostic production, has yielded a fascinating take on electronic music as “cyberfolk” with his prized releases for The Death of Rave, 12th Isle, and Live Adult Entertainment. He inscribes some of his deadliest gear, bar none, on wax - his first new work since ‘Relics’ in 2021 (if we’re not counting ‘Cyberfolk’ of ’22, which is impossible to find, to be fair.)
In two distinctively themed sides he appears to conjure a call-and-response between demons and angels. The A-side’s ritualistic flow of AI-generated black metal vox, toiling folk and squealing 8-bit motifs squashed into ‘Altered Beast’, and the the peerless scenes of AI vocaloids marching to war under burning skies on ‘Federal Zero’, frankly some of our favourite pieces of music in recent memory - each packing a short story’s worth of drama and hackle-raising sensations sounding like absolutely nobody else out there.
The B-side marks a stark contrast with two deployments of dembow-dancehall derived grooves spiced with siren-like AI vox, imparting the uncanniest meaning from effective gibberish in the ohrwurming hooks and eerily balmy sway to ‘Observations on Meaningless Song Texts’, and running the rhythm like Prince Jammy producing endangered species of folksong from the Greek islands.
Make no mistake; this is no add n to x formulaic tripe. A deeply refined, thought-out sense of control and timeless songcraft underlines each of Christos’ generic juxtapositions, evident to anyone with open ears and a feel for the lay of the uncanny valley.
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