Robert Millis

Composed and presented as a live performance with audience participation during Syros Sound Meetings’ Sounding Paths Residency (Ano Syros, Greece, July 2017). A portrait of the island created from recordings made in and around the island of Syros, paying special attention to the wind, to voices, and to odd interior resonances (drainpipes, wells, cupboards, small rooms, desks, bookshelves, drawers): including various catholic and byzantine churches, the Jesuit monastery, the local record store, and the Markos Vamvakaris museum. These field recordings were manipulated alongside improvisations on a small portable wind up gramophone and feedback created in various rooms in the monastery where we stayed. The video uses mostly still images of textures (weathered old records, weathered walls, windows, decay, etc) taken on the island and was projected during my performance.


A way to search for meeting points between the more earthly concerns of rembetika (as represented by Markos Vamvakaris, born on Syros) and the more heavenly pursuits of an island dominated by Catholic churches; a way to begin to scratch the surface of the first recordings made in Greece and the impact of its record industry on music and musicians; and finally a way to think about the past in the present, archiving, preservation, memory and forgetting.

Special thanks to Eva Matsigkou and Ioanna Gerakidi for their voices and on the fly translations and to Rachael Finney for tape fuckery.