Pro-dubbed cassette of 'Hydratmos'. Hand drawn acrylic painting .The tape comes inside a hand-made white cardboard sleeve decorated with two-color threads.
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Eventless Plot | René Margraff | Elena Kakaliagou : Bundle, Edition of 20
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"Hydratmos" the word in greek for vapor; a phase of transition; a state "in between"; a condition of
change and transformation. Water into air, basic elements of our life on this globe, allegories for our
body, mind and soul. Physically, the basic element of the french horn playing in reverse: condensation.
In a time of transitions in and out, I expressed instantly and in one take for each layer my feeling about this state.
I thank Bilgehan Özis who jumped in like a deus ex machina and gave to the pieces a linear path; through
"dryness" to a steam room.
Enjoy the journey!
Solo french horn, idea, compositions and editing: Elena Kakaliagou
1st mix: Ulrich Janczyk
2nd mix: Bilgehan Özis
Dedicated to Ines Katzentaube.
REVIEW BY attn:magazine
The title of this record is the Greek word for “vapour”, and each of these one-take pieces for French horn is a contemplation on this transitional state between water and air. Just as in evaporation, this elegant concept disperses itself into many manifestations. Kakaliagou’s whispering acts as a midpoint between speaking and breathing; moist echoes of reverberant spaces are illuminated by melodies like searchlight into rain; spoken sentences slip in and out of shape, with words unbounding into spittled breath or taut hissing before resuming the form of language. Just as in condensation, Kakaliagou collapses a multitude of thoughts and interpretations into a single moment of performance, into a chosen note, just as the warm potentiality of the breath fastens as droplets to the horn interior.
Aptly, the figure of the solo French horn adopts a certain “hovering” quality. So often supported by other instruments in an ensemble or orchestra, the sound of the horn alone instigates a sense of mournful lack, a state of sombre unrequitement. This is particularly apparent during the heavy fanfare of “Slow Trans”: prolonged calls melt gradually into nothing, and the player quietly ingests the absence of reply before the horn announces itself once again. Again this is a semi-state, vaporously held between the silence of contemplation and the two-person dialogue required to render a conversation. Similarly, “Ascending” circles a five-note pattern without ever locking into the self-embrace of outright repetition, the two ends of the loop never quite touching. Nothing on Hydramatos feels fixed. The room grows and shrinks as echoes adjust in size accordingly, while Kakliagou moves beautifully from emphasising the raw materiality of her instrument – the valves, the tubes – to the picturesque abstraction on “One who never saw the sea, but had shells instead of ears”. As in vapour, the record resists definitive allegiance and finds refuge within infinite possibility.
REVIEW by Harmonic Series
Elena Kakaliagou performs five of their own compositions for solo horn on the 29’ Hydratmos.
As the notes about transitional states suggests, each track is an unfolding of ambiguities mediated through the horn. “Dampf” is embouchurial breath and mouth sounds - tongue clicks, stops, and slaps, the rolling purr of alveolar trills, and more quotidian sounds from combinations of saliva and lip and cheek - and fragments of speech through the horn, whispered, megaphoned, further blurring the fuzzy line between the mouth morphologies and sound results of horn-playing and linguistics. “One who never saw the sea, but had shells instead of ears” is foghorn blows amidst tempestuous breathplay, extended tones quavering in longer durations like a distant sound does in wind, some musing on the similarities of the wind of the air and the wind of the lungs. “Ascending” is melodic clusters that alternately appear rising and circular and might question whether the perception of musical movement is so tethered to pitch relations or if it’s better conveyed through variations in cadence, duration, and volume. “Slow Trans” seems to examine when a tone is not a tone, mostly sustaining just one tone, a little modulated through a kind of phasing or pitch shifting effect, brassy distortions in overblow, and what might be a humming vocal multiphonic. And “Damp Room” features the linguistic sounds of “Dampf” though with an ululating horn presumably in playback, its two voices spatializing the room in their sound though its unclear what combination of distance or volume or maybe something else creates this effect.
Keith Prosk
credits
released October 16, 2021
Produced by: Elena Kakaliagou & Bilgehan Özis
Poem (2nd track ́s title) by Katerina Agyioti
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