Monday, July 18, 2011




"The ghost in the machine"


My dead Mikrasiatis father used to take a lot of nerve pills. Ignorant of even the simplest parts of his inner universe, he used to tell me, "something strange is hapenning to me. I feel as if I had a machine in my mind, playing music all the time. Do you think it´s connected to my pills?"


I´ve always had a ghost of a music machine in my mind, though I´ve never taken nerve pills...
This machine is playing, almost continuously, all kinds of music from Bach to Stockhausen, from ethnic to jazz, but mostly rebetiko songs. The other days I wrote down the following: "I´m walking in a wide street of the north hemisphere, having my forehead turned towards the sky, while I hear in my mind the clapping of Rita Abadzis´s wooden spoons she played in the song of Kostas Skarvelis, "Widow, you set fire in my heart"... ("Χήρα, μ΄έκαψες")...

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/6/6/1947074/XIRA%2C%20M%27%20EKAPSES%201933%20RITA.mp3

"who else has a tormented heart to be my comrade,
to walk together in waste lands and not seeing people..."