Release: October 18, 2024 / Kryptox Records
Format: LP/ Digital
Oh my days this is unreal! The legend of Persephone, Queen of the underworld in Greek mythology, inspires eminent harpist Sissi Rada – collaborator of Lena Platonos, Lee “Scratch” Perry and Brian Eno – to utterly spellbinding degrees on a suite of one-take recordings made with no overdubs, surely proving her mastery of an instrument extant since Greek mythology was conceived.
Manifesting on the Kryptox subsidiary of legendary German label Gomma, ‘Demeter In Aexone’ is a sublime reading of, and tribute to, the myth of Persephone; the daughter of Demeter (and Zeus), to whom the cult, secret rites of the Eleusian Mysteries were dedicated, and have come to represent a metaphor for journeys of self-discovery, rebirth, and the afterlife. From Sissi’s studio overlooking the beach in Voula, Athens, the magic flows from her fingertips on a rare, 100 year old Lyon and Healy Style 3 harp with a ravishingly romantic and lyrically instrumental fluency that taps deep into both her decades of disciplined tekkerz and the millennia old tale to make fresh its meaning for the modern world.
We were lucky enough to pay witness to Sissi performing live this summer at P3 Annihilation Eve’s tiny basement sepulchre in Manchester, and were frankly unprepared for the jaw-dropping beauty of her show, where a tour accident to her harp stand meant she made do with playing it lap-steel style, modestly clad in trackies – no classical gown – and judging by the stunned, wide-eyed response of everyone else, we weren’t alone in being utterly astonished. That effect of immediate, timeless beauty with no tricks or aids is fully apparent on this one, too. Shut your eyes and it transports across time/space to the most rarified recesses of the imagination unstuck from the quotidian and projected into spine-tingling bliss states.
Only lightly brushed (if we’re not mistaken) with the electronics that have crept into her work more recently for Stroom (and hint at her parallel love of house and pop musics), Sissi’s finely honed classical and improvisatory skills hold by a silken thread from the introductory ‘Demeter’, thru her exploration of the instrument’s expanded vocabulary in the wooden knocks of ‘One Thousand Years’, to a haunting description of ‘The Abduction of Persephone’, and more ruggedly folkwise pluckiness of ‘Nysian Fields’, with pitch-bent peculiarities evoking otherworldly strangeness in ‘A Safe and Certain Death’, to the nerve-strumming lines of extended melody registered on ‘Pax Kogx’.
It’s a real no brainer if we ever heard one: dive in without delay.
Text by Boomkat
Credits
Written, performed, recorded and mixed by Sissi Makropoulou
Mastered by Schnittstelle
Photo by Jay Glass Dubs
Artwork by Kostas Murkudis
Για τον Δημήτρη