Kinisi Festival of Sound brings together artists, some of who's practice centres on performing within particular social contexts, with artists creating alternative spaces for listening and combining sounds.
RS: What we're doing is true to the tradition of bringing people into intimate spaces to listen to music together. And although it involves some electronic instruments, and some people work with sound rather than music, strictly, it's to create intimate listening environments, where the audience and the performers are very close to one another and are interacting with each other.
AM: There are also different folk musics involved in the festival, and the idea is allow those folk musics to be heard in a way which is true to the way they should be heard. We're focused on organising concerts which aren't stage based, so the audience is participating in the performance, and feels their own participation in it.
An important part of the process involves research trips across Greece and the Balkans, to meet, hear, see and experience music in the context in which it usually emerges.
RS: When we do our research trips we make soundscape albums. We record environmental sounds, and we record people talking to us, and our own thoughts about the environments, and snippets of music. Some of it's from the bus, some of it's from people playing, some of it's from a mobile phone ringing. And we put it all together into a composition and album, hoping to sell them so that the money can go back into the festival and help us fund the festival.
Mazi Collective (the working collective of Ramona Stout and Alyssa Moxley) released the album, Unbound Atlas, collected field recordings, writing and images from Kinisi festival curatorial journeys.
Our two previous editorials featured conversations with Bulgarian musicians: Ivan Shopov and Cvetelin Andreev from the Kaynak Pipers Band. The journey of their most recent research trip took the Mazi Collective by train from Sofia to Belgrade. Next week we follow in their footsteps, and meet with Serbian composer Igor Cubrilovic, who will be performing with the Serbian Women's Choir "Bajke".
