For our feature on the Athens music scene, percussionist Theo Vazakas, founding member of ARTéfacts, talks to director Louizos Aslanidis, saxophonist Guido de Flaviis, clarinetist Spyros Tzekos and percussionist Costas Seremetis about band life, the ensemble's major and upcoming projects, and the evolution of the scene since its beginnings. 

Tristan Bera: How did you become a percussionist? Can you tell me more about your formative years?
Theo Vazakas: When I was a child, I wanted to play drums, like most percussionists. My parents enrolled me in a music school where we played percussion, not drums, because they didn't know the difference. At the Municipal Odeion in Zografou, there were two teachers: Konstantinos Vorissis, who taught all the skin instruments (snare drum, timpani), and Konstantinos Theodorakos, a pianist by training, with whom Vorissis had practiced percussion. Theodorakos taught keyboard percussion very well, so the specialty was assigned to him. It was the first class in Athens, and I believe in Greece, where the discipline of percussion was divided between different teachers. This was quite common abroad: one teacher taught the keyboard, another the snare drum, or the timpani, at least in Strasbourg where I studied. The teachings of Theodorakos and Vorissis were full of humor, and that's one of the reasons why I spent more time at the music conservatory. It gave me the desire to devote myself to music.

You completed your studies in Athens in 2003. How would you describe the state of the contemporary music scene at the time? What were the musical references? What were the places to listen to it, the general atmosphere or the reception by the public?
There wasn't really a scene. In my memory, the Megaron was the only venue that programmed contemporary music. And rather rarely. The Athens Festival, at the Odeon of Herod Atticus, programmed well-known artists such as the Ensemble Intercontemporain, but the choice of pieces played was not very advanced. It was Messiaen, for example. The Ορχήστρα Των Χρωμάτων (Orchestre de Couleurs) sometimes did contemporary, for example, paying homage to Xenakis. This orchestra, founded by Manos Hadjidakis, no longer exists. Even so, we sensed that the musicians weren't having much fun with it; contemporary music actually bored them. The National Association of Greek Composers, founded by Theodoros Antoniou, was the only association, the only ensemble, doing contemporary chamber music in Athens at the time. But it was neither really an ensemble, nor a team. Antoniou recruited musicians as he went along. As for the audience, it was very small, around forty people, always the same people you'd see at every concert. 

In 2003, you moved to Strasbourg. What difference did you feel on discovering this new scene for you?
You could say that France is the Mecca of contemporary music! In any case, I had this impression when I arrived in Strasbourg at the time of the Musica festival, one of the biggest contemporary music festivals in France. It was striking. Ten days of non-stop contemporary music in such a small town, compared to Athens! But the mentality of the audience was much the same. Even though we're in France, even though there's a bigger audience for contemporary music in Strasbourg than there is in Athens, the reception is the same.

What do you mean by that? How would you define this mentality?
Very few festival-goers are really passionate about sound. Most come to have a good time, but don't necessarily know a good set, a good piece, or something really new. And then there are the adventurous [NDA: a neologism coined by Theo combining the wordsadventurous and curious] who really go off to discover something they don't know at all. Of course, there are also those who come just to show off. I identify the same categories in France as in Athens. Perhaps the difference is that here, there are fewer connoisseurs who come to the concerts. In France, those for whom it's a profession and a passion - musicology students, composition students or instrumentalists - flock to the concerts. 

In 2000, apart from the Megaron, the Herod Atticus Odeon and the Orchestre de Couleurs, were there any more alternative, less institutional venues where amateurs organized themselves? I'm thinking of ABOUT, for example, or similar venues...
ABOUT didn't exist yet... I wasn't performing when I was a student. I'm trying to remember if KNOT GALLERYwhere you could listen to free jazz, had already opened in Ampelokipi [a district of Athens]... I'm not sure. 

How did you meet the members ofARTéfacts, and how did you decide to form an ensemble? I think you're a founding member. We met at the age of 17-18 in the ASON - Athens Youth Symphony Orchestra, a symphony orchestra formed by a conductor and made up of Greek students from various music schools. We became friends, and some of us were already keen to introduce people to contemporary music. At the time, there was no ensemble promoting this genre. And the mentality of musicians towards contemporary music really bothered us... Then we left to study abroad, but continued to discuss the idea of such a group. We thought that with a bit of κέφι [NdA: kefi in Greek means deep passion without really being translatable] we could give a certain impetus that we weren't yet finding in Athens. We formed in 2007. And our first concert as an ensemble took place in January 2008: that's our date of birth.

So the formation of ARTéfacts was really a written, planned proposal... It wasn't an organic grouping at all?
No, it was very planned. 

How do you choose the compositions for the ARTéfacts ensemble?
It really depends on the project. In the case of a project that we take from conception to concert, we try to involve composers. There's usually a theme. This is the case with our first album, Thiva Km 102 (2013). A group of art therapists were launching a program with the inmates of a women's prison at kilometer 102 in the city of Thebes, and invited us to collaborate on the artistic form that the archives of this program should take, to transform these sound archives and turn them into a CD album. We then worked with composers (including Laurent Durupt and Maurilio Cacciatore) based on the therapists' recordings. The process lasted from 2010 to 2013. The result was very powerful, driven by violent testimonies in which women recounted how they had been captured by the police... Composers write for us. Sometimes we're offered an idea or a concert. In such cases, we try to put together a program, as we did, for example, on the occasion of Neos Kosmos at Stegi Onassis at the invitation of Christos Carras. We can also develop a new project based on an inspiring theme, or vice versa. Two or three pieces form a theme and we create an evening. For example, our first concert was on the theme of jazz in contemporary music. 

As an ensemble, how do you make decisions? I'm always interested in how an artistic collective works...
We joke that we're a democratic ensemble that discusses everything but ultimately does what Theodore wants! (That's me, Theodore!). Well, we talk. At one time, we met every fortnight to exchange ideas, even though we didn't make music. We've tried out different ways of working. On an artistic level, we make decisions together. There's no artistic director imposing a vision. That's one of the reasons why we decided not to have a composer or conductor. This decision has both advantages and disadvantages. Our rehearsals take longer than a normal ensemble. We are very strict about recruiting members. The core is quite small. There are five of us at the moment, but we've had as many as eight members. After three years of existence, we've created a framework. It's not an artistic manifesto, but it's a set of reflections to protect the cohesion of the group and the way it works. Easy decisions are taken by majority vote. For more difficult decisions, such as the entry of a new member, the vote must be unanimous.

Is studio life very important to you?
We're completely independent. That's different from other ensembles that are given rehearsal spaces with instruments. We started out in Filothei [a district of Athens] in a 30m2 studio, which could hardly hold twenty people and the drums, percussion, etc... Three years ago, we moved to Agios Dimitrios[ibidem] in an 80m2 studio. The covid crisis has slowed down our development. We only meet there when we're working on a project. It's not a creative laboratory. 

What is your relationship with the stage and the audience?
We really wanted to break away from the image of academic contemporary music, which too much marks the distance between the person making the music and the audience receiving it. I don't like to feel that distance as an audience. We're always looking for ways to be accessible and to reach the widest possible audience. We conceive our concerts as a flow, a piece of art, a work in itself, without too many pauses between pieces. And we try to maintain attention from beginning to end, without big breaks and long set-up changes, so that the audience leaves the music and the concert as little as possible. 

How would you describe your music in terms of genres, in some detail?
There's no such thing as ARTéfacts music...apart from the projects. Each project has its own identity. Of course, we haven't played all the genres of contemporary music, but enthusiasts could easily find their way around our repertoire: minimalism, serialism, and so on. 

When did you introduce images into the concerts?
In 2009, with the arrival of director Louizos Aslanidis who had done his military service with clarinettist Spyros Tzekos. Louizos has a production company that houses all our projects. This infrastructure has helped us a lot on a practical level. When he makes videos - because we don't systematically produce them - he puts himself in the position of the audience and the listener, listening and feeling, and tries to find out what the audience would need to see to feel more comfortable. 

Could you tell us about an important ARTefacts project for you?
Zapping! A tribute to Frank Zappa and Cohabitation with K.Bhta [pronounced Kapavita] have a special place in our hearts... Spyros [Tzekos] and I conceived the project with K.Bhta even before we formed the ensemble. It was in Amsterdam, where Spyros was studying, that while listening to the album Acoustica (2005), in which the ensemble Alarm Will Sound rearranges the music of Aphex Twin, we had the idea of working on the music of Stereo NovaK.Bhta's band. Their music had given rhythm to our adolescence... It's a tribute album to K.Bhta made with K.Bhta. Because we first did the parts, the recording, the demos with the composer Kornilios Selamsisthen we approached K.Bhta on myspace. Facebook didn't exist yet. He agreed to take part. We finally set up the project with Stegi Onassis. The album took ten years to complete, from the time we started talking about it to its release in 2015.
As for the Zappa project, we proposed it many times to venues to no avail, before the Athens Festival finally agreed to program it for the 2017 edition. We liked it a lot because it's music we love, and it has a very obvious link with contemporary music. 

Since your debut over ten years ago, has your relationship with technology evolved?
I still suck at it (laughs). Louizos and Spyros use it, but we haven't really integrated it. We've stayed analog. We've done some live electronics, but it's not a real component of our work, unless the composer requests it for his piece. 

What about your relationship with other genres? like jazz, for example?
As a group, we don't have much contact with other genres, unless a collaboration requires it. I think Guido [De Flaviis, the saxophonist] plays a bit of jazz. I don't. I listen to jazz. I listen to jazz, but I haven't studied it. 

Do you share any common references within the group? And what are yours?
The only common reference would be the well-known rock of the 1970s-80s: Pink Floyd, Zeppelin or Queen. As for the contemporary music repertoire, everyone studied in different circles. When I was younger, I really liked Evelyn Glennie and Steven Schick. I decided to study in Strasbourg underEmmanuel Séjourné, whose work I admired and who played the repertoire I wanted to play in concerts. 

And in contemporary Greek music in general, not necessarily percussion?
For me, the most important name is [Iannis] Xenakis. It's a fairly widespread Greek habit: when someone is dead and appreciated abroad, we end up appreciating him here. But when he was alive, it wasn't music. I also studied Jani Christou quite a lot, even though there's not much percussion, but I really liked his early Stravinsky-like music. Then there's Nikos Skalkottas, who's an indisputable force to be reckoned with. For me, these are the three Greeks. 

How would you describe the scene in Athens today?
I hope we've helped improve it. I really like this scene. It's blossoming. On the other hand, I can see that over the last three years there's been less passion and dynamism. 

Could this decline have begun before the pandemic?
The pandemic accentuated it...

Could you name the places that, for you, make up the Athenian scene?
Stegi Onassis really pushed the scene from 2011. It's the first time we were paid, before that we paid to play... There was ABOUT, KNOT Gallery, the Embros Theatre which was a squat nestled in Psyrri, ANART Galerie which still exists, I think, the Trianon on Patision Avenue, and the Parnassos, in Plateia Karitsi, more classical. The Parnassos was the first concert hall in Athens before the Megaron, and was considered to have the best acoustics. We've never played at the Goethe Institute, but we have collaborated with the French Institute, which supported the Thiva Km 102 because of the presence of French composers. 

Which composers, soloists or ensembles could you mention today?
TETTIX, ERGON or DISSONART in Thessaloniki...I think the ensembles held their own, so it makes composers want to collaborate. What was striking [in Athens] was that the stage was boosted by the audience. The golden period for contemporary music is really 2008-2014, in the middle of the economic crisis, strangely enough. Then, contemporary music was no longer programmed in the big halls. It went underground again. I don't like this mysticism, I'm more of a mathematician.

What challenges must be met to ensure the future of this scene?
If I observe a drop in interest, it's not extinction, it's still going strong though. Some ensembles exist and others continue to emerge. For as long as there have been institutions, the musicians who are part of the scene, and I include ARTéfacts, have forgotten to take charge of their own history, relying instead on institutional programmers and communication officers. We forgot to promote ourselves, to write our own story. Thanks to these institutions, we suddenly felt we could make music. But that's not enough. You have to make music, but you also have to build a story. 

What are ARTéfacts' current projects?
From November 7 to 13, in Strasbourg, we are collaborating with two French ensembles, Links (based in Paris) and HANATSUmiroir (based in Strasbourg). The project, entitled EXOrgueis centred on a monumental organ whose parts can be transferred to the hall. The computer-controlled sound is spatialized. We've already done a version in Paris, and we're continuing to do residencies with composers: in Poissy with composer Laurent Durupt; and in Strasbourg based on two pieces by Sergio Rodriguez and Mathias Fernandez. In February, we'll be in residence with Alexandros Markeas at the Mégaron. In May, we will be recording at Radio France the piece composed by Annabelle Playeagain as part of the EXOrgue project, for which I don't know if it will end up as an album.
We are also in the process of setting up an experimental project, based on an idea by Christos Carras at Stegi Onassis, with the Syrian & Greek Youth Forum (SGYF)and under the direction of musicologists and curators Danae Stefan and Yannis Kotsonis [the founders of Knot Gallery]. We're trying to find a way of making a completely different kind of music out of contemporary and Middle Eastern music culture. We're in the middle of it right now. If the result is satisfactory, we'll play on the Stegi stage. If not, it will remain an experiment, or a video only, because everything is filmed.

Would you like to add anything? Five words to describe ARTéfacts...
ARTeFACT is NoT an OrDiN4Ry EnS3MbLe... What makes me proud is that we've been involved in the creation of some forty works, and it's thanks to our existence that these works have seen the light of day (laughs). 

Tristan Bera in Athens.