One of the most interesting units in remarkable label Staalplaat is sublabel Mort Aux Vaches, releases of which have been already reviewed at Sound Proector for several times. Here the records for radio program Dwars are released in limited editions of 500-1000 copies. Each release is a live concert of a musician or a group of musicians - musicians who can't be uninteresting. Recently in rather long and beautiful list of Mort Aux Vaches there was noticed a little known to us sound designer from the capital of Greece - Thanassis Kaproulias aka Novi_sad.His record for VPRO is rather complicated - I even couldn't make myself deepen into it while the first listening. I ran up, hit myself strongly over the monolithic sound wall and went off for pretty long distance. The thing is that one must find a comfortable place, tiny hole which will allow to pick off delicately a piece of the cover and soak into the dense body of sounds. It's very important not to miss the first 2-3 minutes of almost total silence, when only hardly audible hissings can be heard. It's the moment of entrance, the moment when one would think irreversible processes start increasingly happen. Hissings and sudden flashes of industrial crash develop into amorphous stream of abrasive noise, there lives something on the background, something unclear, indistinctive. As if suffering with agoraphobia I happened to get into a big city, inside human anthill, interlacing of streets and houses. Panic increases, it becomes stronger and up to the 24th minute of the record you suddenly feel - it started. You are running, running, suffocating, looking back, running, stopping, looking all around, turning left, moving faster again trying to move through the countless number of people - to the right, to the left, to the right again... People, there are hundreds, thousands of them around - going forward to you, pushing you from your back, shouting to telephones, coming into shops and coming out of them, looking straight at you, crying, smiling. Run, run, I must run and come somewhere, I must break away until the reality squashes me with its large-tonnage press. About 10 minutes of crazy pressing and it seems that you are ready to drill your head like Max Cohen from the unforgettable film "Pi" by Darren Aronofsky. Tiredness accumulates and it seems that everything is just about to end and it happens really so. It is like if you lost consciousness somewhere on the outskirts of a town - a hit after which you open you eyes and don't feel what's happened several seconds ago. Novi_sad lowers the noise stream, lets you breathe deeply and breathe out and dedicates the rest of the record to some kind of withdrawal - the sounds comes down slowly turning in the result into several minutes of slightly distinctive field records, made obviously on some hill not far away from a road. I sweated...
- Novi_sad
- Staalplaat