I met the Greek sound experimentalist Yorgos Mizi in Lebanon in 2019. MIZI performed that evening at the Irtijal experimental music festival as part of the Trigger Happy quartet, a group that includes three Yorgoses and one Manthos. It was a daring, incomparable concert! The band's setup included hundreds of sounding items - from music boxes and clockwork machines to homemade turntables and ringing alarm clocks. Complement this wow-sound with Yorgos Stavridis’ drum hooks and you have got a crazy collage of free jazz, plunderphonics, musique concrete and rock-and-roll. I haven't experienced such a drive for a long time! The next day, we were already walking with the whole band around Beirut, and in the dead of night we stumbled upon Rabih Beahni’s heroic DJ-set. Some time later, I contacted Yorgos, and he sent me the album that you are holding in your hands. Listening to the album's deep yet insanely collaged sound, I began to explore MIZI's creative method. Yorgos creates his music by hacking and dissecting old vinyl and cassette players, manipulating tape and deforming digital files. "Music Behind Music" is an album-journey through the deepest nooks and crannies of the playback medium and its content: from the Athens Polytechnic University, besieged by the Greek army in November 1973, to the dark spaces and chiming bells of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia. This is a collection of three distinct pieces exploring the hidden sounds, stories, sonic fragments, mechanisms and artifacts of the storage and playback medium. This hidden assemblage of sonic events is recomposed by MIZI in an attempt to shed some light on the “Music Behind Music”.

Evgeny Galochkin
TOPOT Label

“Music Behind Music” is based on the theoretical framework of media archaeology, extending and applying the ideas of the field on experimental music. The main music material is derived through the transmutation, extension, redefinition and cracking of obsolete recording media. “Music Behind Music” is a reflection on the unique properties of the media and the definition of information/noise; an invitation to listen to the music behind the music, a tribute to surface noise.

A1: Rummaging The Medium (15:39)

“Rummaging the Medium” aims to reveal the hidden sounds and the true nature of the phonographic apparatus, through the manipulation and interruption of transparent normative operation. The discursive and material manifestations of culture are emphasized through collage like-environments of found LPs, EPs and cassette tapes. The stored information are giving way to the sound of the moving parts, the sound of the storage surface and electromagnetic interference. In “Rummaging the Medium” information and noise are in a constant, unstable flux.

B1: 1973 (07:31)

“1973” is based on a cassette tape that I found in my grandma's storage room. The tape belongs to either my dad or my grandad. On the tape there's a recording of a radio show about the Athens Polytechnic uprising. The radio show is possibly of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ΕΡΤ) with broadcast date 17.11.1982. There are multiple transformations of the archival recording at play. The first archival recording of the radio transmission from inside the Polytechnic has been saved in a storage medium, lossy copies of which must have been used for the 1982 radio playback which has again been recorded in a cassette tape by my family. This constant generation loss, reaffirms the disembodied nature of those voices, granting them the ability to freely flow through a temporal void. With each playback, the echo of the words and actions of those voices seeps back into our present.

B2: Variations on the Bells of Alexander Nevsky (10:35)

This piece is based on a found record with the title “The Bells of the Alexander Nevski Memorial Church”. The linear notes of the record explain the significance of the landmark: “St. Alexander Nevski Memorial Church, situated in the centre of Sofia, capital of Bulgaria, is an imposing witness of Bulgarian cultural life, a mastership of architecture, being as well a historic herald of an unfading and bright virtue, characterizing the whole Bulgarian people and their fathomless gratitude towards their Russian brothers-liberators.” Without ever visiting Sofia, or being Bulgarian my only connection with the temple and it’s chimes was this record. An architectural feat reduced to grooves on a plastic. My piece is an elaboration of this reduction, using the sounds of the chimes as the base material on a series of transmutations and variations both on a musical and physical level.