Maps for Losing Oneself: Nick Tsiavos

BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE

 

Greek-Australian bassist Nick Tsiavos is fascinated with the past. And by past, I don’t mean a few decades ago. I mean the past which is defined as ancient. The past which has survived for over a thousand years and countless generations through tradition and culture. With innovation, knowledge, and respect, Nick takes some of the most culturally significant music of ancient Greece and reimagines them through his genre-busting performances. Nick takes the time to teach us about the ancient burial songs of his homeland, and his thoughts about living in Australia, ahead of his events ‘Maps for Losing Oneself’ and ‘Liminal’ at Dark Mofo this June.

 

Tell me a bit about your history with and personal connection to the music of Greece.

 

I was born in Greece, and it was that culture I was born into.  But, what is it to be Greek?
This is a much wider question and it probably would take too much ink to explore. As part of the post Second World War Greek diaspora, I was whisked off the Greek landscape and deposited into Australia just as the 1960s arrived. Although, I have to say Australia, at a cultural level, did not easily leave the 1950s (at least, not until Whitlam was ushered in to power). The earliest music I was exposed to was my weekly immersion, via our local Greek Orthodox Church, into Byzantine Chant; and what I feel is one of its secular satellites in music, Ipirotika – the music of the region of Epirus in North Western Greece, an aesthetic that combined ancient Byzantine and Pentatonic modes with slow, trance like dance rhythms; dark and full of melancholy, and Mirologia, the threnodies and songs of mourning and despair. Anyhow, this was the stuff my parents had on records at home. This is the stuff embedded into my unconscious, and like memory, it is fragmented, transitory – and quite often, mistaken!

 

Greece is a country with such a rich cultural history – can you talk us through the stories and traditions behind these ancient chants? What keeps them so powerful today?

 

This music, both sacred and secular, is woven tightly into Greek history and culture. Many of these texts have been a part of Greek Orthodox worship for centuries, written in the early years of the Christian Church – and some speculate that some of these texts may have been derived from pre Christian pagan forms. The fact that this music has been around so long makes it seem as if it is almost woven into the Greek DNA. What I do with it is another thing.

 

Your music has been described as a “personal response to the problematics of Australian culture.” Where do you feel these problems lie, and how can we make things better?

 

I have always felt a slight unease at some aspects of contemporary Australia: the stuff of the past that has not really been put to rest, no real sense of justice to the first people of the land. Not all can be dismissed, or excused, with a “she’ll be right, mate!” It all starts from that point and moves through many other aspects of the body culture, stuff we are all, to this day, dealing with. There has been much written on all aspects of this country, light and dark, but my own position has been one of a sense of displacement, never truly feeling a sense of belonging. I have not a clue about how to make things better, but I hope my kids can read the outcomes in future historical publications.

 

Tell me a bit about some of the philosophical questions and themes you’re exploring through your inclusion of text by Nick Trakakis and C.P. Cavafy in ‘Maps for Losing Oneself’. 

 

This is a collection of scraps – scraps of texts, scraps of ideas, a quickly drawn map of how to get from here to there.

 

Some of the texts sung come from the threnodies and burial songs of Northern Greece; they are known as ‘mirologia’ and are part of the wonderful rituals developed within that culture over the millennia to make sense of death and loss. There are fragments of dark text from local poet and philosopher Nick Trakakis that have woven themselves into this journey, alongside a trace of C.P. Cavafy and his wonderful spin on ‘the journey’ – the poem ‘Ithaca’. The music is a cartography of the landscape of loss and desire. Ancient chant, once again deconstructed through a prism of modernist energies, an architecture of instability to channel our energies and ideas through, and a desire to discover beauty within the anarchic landscape of our ‘Taxidi’ (Greek word for ‘journey’).

 

How do you incorporate the bass into your performance, and what role does the instrument play in the performances in representing your musical ideas? Why is it a suitable instrument for this music?

 

This is where everything starts for me. It is the bass that provides the initial sound world, it is from this point that most of my explorations flow from. The instrument encompasses a huge range of sonic possibility – drones, percussive effects, melodic lines and a range from sub sonic depths to brilliant harmonic sparks, throbbing pulse and a great noise generator!

 

Nick Tsiavos hold midnight performances of ‘Maps for Losing Oneself’ and ‘Liminal’ at St David’s Cathedral for Dark Mofo 2014 on June 20 and June 21. For more information go to www.darkmofo.net.au. 

 

Image supplied.