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The Silent Cry Of An Urban Orangutan

by Yannis Despotakis

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about

Back in August, when I realized I'll be "stuck" in Athens for longer than usual (due the travel ban related with the pandemic), I got the urge make a serious upgrade to the studio I'd built 20yrs ago.
Long story short, was done with construction right before the lockdown that started in November.
Exhausted but rather excited to test the new space I had very little time to invite musicians I admire to collaborate.

Having known Yannis and his work for almost a decade I was always struck by the haunting, timeless, ancient into the future sounds he produces with the highly customized drum set he uses. All the pieces are chosen one by one and are there for a reason. To that, add the drones & the various forms of voice work (from greek traditional song to overtone singing and a few places & eras in between) he gets into to start getting the full picture.

What you get here is a pure 40m one take/two track improvisation, no edits or overdubs whatsoever.

A few words from the artist:

As far as the first solo album i've ever recorded and that you're about to throw your ears on, I would like to share a couple of notes.
The title-The Silent Cry Of An Urban Orang-Utan- is something that came naturally if one is aware of how we used to be homo nomad-ius and how we mutated into homo city-ens.
Now, -utan in Malay means man of the woods. And since the jungle in which we re born into is an urban one, then this is a cry of a lone Urban Orang Utan, a mourning of what has been lost and a scream for what is about to come.

The 1st Part is based on a RIZITIKO melody from the island of Crete. RIZITIKO is a very old form of folk rebel songs & RIZA means Root.
They are sung throughout the island with myriads of variations and that's mainly because Crete was and is in between 3 continents :
Africa-Asia-Europe. Anybody who came as a settler, invader etc left their mark and brought their own musical systems.
My variation of On a Tall Mountain (The Eagle) was instantly improvised and is an homage to the living work and loving memory of the late great, Dr. Milford Graves (1941-2021) as well as the work and memory of Demetrio Stratos (1945-1979) that we lost way too early.

The 2nd part is a song/chant for what has been named ANTHROPOCENE.
For the 1st time in interplanetary mother Earth's history, one species holds all of existence within it's fingers.
This is a song/chant, a prayer, a calling for us -the people- to get organized, united, to stand up and reclaim what is rightfully and root-fully ours and that is our Nature.

More and more people have been utterly abusing the term Free Jazz.
But one must always remember that back in the '60s , the New Thing -that we know call Free Jazz/Improvisation etc-
was part of the social revolution that was taking place in the U.S.A
One could not and would not separate the two.
So it makes sense that the word Free has to do with Freedom which means Liberty from any social, racial and any other form of institutionalized barrier.
Art and Life go together cause one breeds and feeds the other.
And since Art comes from Life and Music is included in Art, then we can all understand why music does not come from music.
("To say that music comes from music, is like sayin' babies come from babies". Keith Jarret)

Yannis Despotakis May 1st 2021

credits

released May 7, 2021

Yannis Despotakis _ Voice, Shruti box & Percussion

Produced, Engineered, Mixed & Mastered by Stelios Mihas in 4D, Athens

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4D studio Brooklyn, New York

Home of the productions of nyc based athenian guitarist & producer Stelios Mihas.

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Page design art by Katerina Konstantouroy

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