Anatolian Tones

On a February evening in Athens, the skyline takes me by surprise. The Parthenon is a given, ancient grandeur presiding over all as it has long done, but the modern concrete apartment blocks feel ruinous, too. Their grubby beige wilts next to the ornamental flourishes of upmarket homes and government buildings, and looms over those tapping on car windows in a leaden quest for small change.

It’s been a fortnight or so since the iron barricades around Parliament were removed and Syntagma Square was filled with those protesting the European Central Bank’s decision to stop accepting Greek bonds as collateral against liquidity. Among myriad macroeconomic factors, bullish austerity has seen the country go from the relative economic boom of its recent past to its current, near-bust.

Perhaps it’s a hyper-attentiveness of ours towards the Athenian mood, but feet seem to move at an unwilling pace outdoors. Nearby markets are being gutted and rinsed out for the sunrise haggle and we clumsily knock legs that jut out from dining huddles because we’re trying to take it all in, all at once. Now, we’re heading indoors: to Six D.O.G.S., a nightclub that’s been open since 2010 and is often called the best in the city for house and techno parties. Their welcome changes the pace.

“It’s a shame that you can’t be here in the summer,” chimes a host. “The garden is amazing.” We crane our necks and see trees break up through the wide stone, and imagine it draped with lights and bodies. The club’s real assembly is empty. They tell us that tonight’s party is a big one for Six D.O.G.S. but the club fills out with a few hundred at most and as the steady 4x4 of minimalistic techno kicks into the night, the impression it leaves is a curious one. If this is the only dedicated underground club in the capital, the direction the scene is heading in looks uncertain from here. What does techno mean in contemporary Greek culture?

“This is the problem, actually,” insists George Mavrikos. “Techno has always been somewhere between isolation and community, and Greeks are a considered people who love community. We really take care of each other – our friends, our family, the person standing next to us. We are hospitable to the point of being protective. Because of that, sometimes, I feel that techno cannot survive in Greece...” How so? “Here, you cannot isolate people – especially together in a small, dark club – because we’re a culture that’s too relaxed for that kind of intensity,” he elaborates.

“That’s why pretty much the only proper club that we have in a city of four million is only busy for a few months of the year. Otherwise, the DJ will be playing inside to a quiet dance floor. Everyone is outside drinking, smoking and talking in the heat.” I pose this to the Six D.O.G.S. crew, and they agree. “The club is usually open from the end of September till the beginning of May. The heat doesn’t help at all. When it’s almost 40 degrees in the city in July most prefer to be in open-air spaces, so it doesn’t make any sense for us to keep the club open.” George then nails it down. “Audiences here are very small – a few hundred at best, maybe – but I’ve seen Moodymann play to 25 people, too. We don’t need techno like other places do, but some of us definitely want it.”

George runs Nous Disques, a label that’s part of a small, disparate group of Greek house and techno crews on the rise, having formed (for the most part) in the early years of the economic crisis. Alongside Nous Disques stand Modal Analysis, Lower Parts, bliq, Echovolt Records and the in-house label for Six D.O.G.S.. They’re either based in Greece or run by Greeks from cities like London and Berlin, since some have escaped austerity in order to survive.

While George left Athens for Berlin and started Nous Disques on the encouragement of fellow Greek label owner Bill Kouligas of PAN (who he shortly thereafter started working for, too), others have gravitated back and forth to Greece over the decades with mixed emotions. During the economic boom of the late ’80s and early ’90s, Costis of Bliq was one of many who left to study in the UK thanks to generous state grants.

“In the ’90s the economy wasn’t necessarily in a ‘good state,’ but there was enough money and plenty of jobs for us. I left Greece for London at 18-years old and electronic music grew on me there. When we were young teenagers in [the smaller, northern city of] Thessaloniki we would see DJs like Jeff Mills play regularly, so it wasn’t necessarily new to us, but the quantity and quality of UK clubs was very new. Whenever I came back for the holidays I would bring all my records back to play at parties in Thessaloniki and Athens.”

George says, “The problem is that, until the past few years, the scene has had far more input than output: we’re like a sponge rather than a filter. It’s difficult to explain. We are isolated in this place, and the amount of input can be disorientating.”

The Modal Analysis crew agree. “[The ’90s] was a very wealthy period for Greek society. That generation didn’t care so much about creating its own thing. They were happy to consume what they were presented with – and we kind of resented it, even when people were coming to dance with us. You can’t just consume forever.” The relative comfort meant that rave culture “wasn’t so much anarchic, like in cities that didn’t have anything going for them,” says George. “In hindsight, raving wasn’t radical because it was a safe time and we didn’t bother to create a style of electronic music to really call our own.”

Duly, raving throughout the late ’80s and into the ’90s was an ad hoc activity and the music would vary depending on the setting. Gatherings were often held in industrial spaces in the cities and in the mountains outside Athens, where the sound systems could be let loose and the police force was less the wiser, while club-based parties like Troll, Insomnia, Alisida, Faz, Terminal, Decadence, The Sunrise Zone and Battery promoted varying degrees of acid house, industrial techno and psychedelic trance. They shared ravers between the cities, too, as Costis remembers.

“People were definitely coming from Athens to party in Thessaloniki. Every Thursday night, Troll would be full of teenagers who would bring backpacks full of extreme rave outfits to wear. Big DJs from the US and UK, like Colin Faver, were playing all the time.” Troll caught the attention of the local media in the early ’90s and the ensuing hysteria became the stuff of instant legend. Panajiotis of the Lower Parts label remembers a TV broadcast called The End of an Era, which used scare tactics to warn locals about the parties – with perhaps unintended results. “Once [the media] found the outdoor parties in the mountains, they started to dig around and interview people outside the parties in the city. Obviously, some of them were pretty wasted.”

What happened then? “They would ask, ‘What is this music?’ and get answers like, ‘It’s magic, it’s a different world, we’re tripping,’ and so on. There’s one example of a person inside a party being asked, ‘What do you see when you’re dancing?’ and he (now famously) replies, ‘I see circles!’ It’s gone down as a catchphrase of sorts here. Afterwards, you can imagine what happened. ‘Oh my god, these kids are in danger!’ Mothers were invited onto panel shows to ask their kids what they were doing at raves.”

Despite this, raves continued to grow around Athens and Thessaloniki, often taking advantage of the impressive landscape to throw escapist gatherings on farms and in vineyards. At its peak in the mid-’90s acts like The Prodigy even played massive outdoor shows, which were broadcast on local television. There was a lack of permanent infrastructure and a particularly Greek flavour to the sound, but there was still an appetite.

By the early 2000s, though, a splintering occurred. Destinations like Mykonos boomed and a more commercial house music industry tailored to tourists built up around it. The psychedelic trance trend became the only structured alternative, with island parties attracting fans from across Europe. Those who didn’t jump on this new chance of a mainstream paycheque or mass hippy gathering grew weary of the instability and lack of local creative output in the underground, and drifted back to the popular mainstays of native pop and folk – mixtures of Arabic and Greek influences focused on melody and storytelling, “where the singer is always crying for the love that he lost, and how bad his drinking is,” quips Panajiotis – or more politically-charged genres such as black metal and punk rock, which has long had its dedicated and more radically-inclined audiences.

By the time the Olympics was over in 2004, tourism had further sucked the oxygen out of the local scene and the affection between Athens and Thessaloniki’s house and techno ravers had waned. It would prove a depressing time for those who had worked to bring the culture over from abroad. “People say, ‘Oh music’s always a part of my life. I always find the time, money and energy to do these things,’ but when it really comes down to it, it is a luxury,” says George. “What happened at that time in Greece proves that it’s a very strange mix of a wider cultural lack of interest and money, and once the crisis started [around 2007-08] there was a real lack of will. People just have to survive. Survival means that real investment in DIY culture suffers, and our music was a part of that.”

Survival, now, is a precarious business. A somewhat toxic swirl is in motion. There’s a lack of record shops¹¹Panajiotis praises Athens’ Habeat, yet says even “when friends were opening record shops in the ’90s, at the party scene’s peak, they were closing down after one or two years”, and a profit-focused mainstream clubbing scene that Modal Analysis say has promoters from larger clubs sending their bouncers to DIY parties to cause trouble. “They see it as competition. They don’t think in the long term. They just want to make money and go home.”

What kind of trouble are we talking about here, though? “There were occasions where the local mafia would set in, and the DJs would end up not getting paid. When we say ‘mafia’, we’re talking about money laundering in the nightclub business, you know? They’ve not got guns, but they are that kind of people. If you want to work in the club scene and you start a new party, some people will come to your club and ask for a lot of money so that you can ‘stay running’: to ‘offer you protection,’ ha.”

This is a wider situation that affects Six D.O.G.S., too. “We will keep providing support to the scene by not making the easy choices and following the hard path to keeping the artistic integrity, but it’s getting tougher every year. Especially when it comes to inviting international DJs to play for the club. Artist fees and flights are getting significantly more expensive at a time when the community has less money to spend. Every year there are new limits on what we can afford because of this never-ending crisis, so we try to adjust.”

As each of the label heads wearily rattles through their concerns about how such socio-economic realities can or cannot (or will or will not, perhaps) give a foothold for their work, an awareness of how debilitating this must be for them not just as producers, promoters and label owners, but also as Greeks, sinks in. Unlike the behemoths of London and Berlin that they’ve long looked to for inspiration, electronic music is not an industry in Athens and Thessaloniki. If anything, decades after a second-hand perspective of the culture was brought to Greece, techno is becoming more of a therapeutic outlet for individuals struggling to adapt to the harsh realities of contemporary life. And perhaps, finally, they have the will to create the decidedly Greek output these diehards have always felt that the scene was lacking.

Modal Analysis glow when they speak about the music of Morah, a newcomer who they deem “a product of the crisis” and who “puts all his effort and money into it for the love – to buy records, to bring in his favourite DJs for his Phormix parties – then has barely has the cash to feed his dog.” What does it really mean to be a product of the crisis when electronic music is your lifeblood? “You see people getting desperate,” says Panajiotis, “but we’re also feeling inspired. Our parent’s generation are feeling hopeless and mistreated by the past, but all this disappointment is actually giving the younger generation space to create.”

On this, the crew become impassioned. “If you take a step back and say, ‘This is fucked up and we can’t do anything about it,’ like our parents do, then what’s going to happen? If everyone leaves, nothing will happen. The truth is that a lot of producers have come out of the crisis. It caused a burst of creativity. It’s hard to run a label here. We’re fucking broke. But we need to build something stable not just for its own purposes, but to solve our psychological problems. The turning point for that was in the late 2000s when many small Greek labels like us came to the surface.”

They all push the idea that there’s a concerted effort towards collectivism in order to survive, but the sound of this small, dedicated and disparate group isn’t a clear-cut and unified one – mercifully. When I ask Bliq what Greek techno feels like, though, his answer comes without hesitation. “Spiritual. I mean, it’s techno for sure, but there are elements of our nature in there. It makes trouble leave your mind. It’s rolling, driving techno. Some of the darkness in our sound is also reflective of the Greek mindset. We are frustrated and depressed and we need to express that, too. What’s still missing from Greek producers is their own identity, though. This is a difficult thing to achieve, but we need a transformation in the sound because a groove will always be a groove. We need that other element.”

George, unprompted, agrees. “I think Greece needs people that make music based on their own experiences, not from all this input. It needs more individualism, which is lacking in Greek society because we lack belief in ourselves.” Panajiotis, meanwhile, feels confident that it will eventually come. “I don’t know if it will be possible to understand what the Greek sound will become in the ‘classic’ sense of techno. It would be… an Anatolian tone. It’s a language in itself, but it can be hard to speak to each other in different ways.”

How the music on their labels speak to one another tells a story of how they’ve filtered down the input of decades past. Local producers sit alongside non-Greek signings to create nuanced and discursive results. Nous Disques orbits on an unsteady house axis: pulling the rugged ambience of Karen Gwyer into the same zone as Greek producer Miltiades, as his glazed drones fold inwards. Bliq’s strongest Hellenic connect is Thessaloniki’s Audio Atlas, whose releases on Hieroglyphic Being’s Mathematics label as well as Bliq work within shades of dubby house minimalism.

Modal Analysis and Lower Parts have more aggressive concerns. The former champions Greek acts like Sawf, whose Sonic EP on the label is full of steely, rolling decimations in a techno landscape all-too rife with heel-dragging kick drum fetishism. The latter’s most recent effort, from TX Connect, warps this aggression with the kind of acid lines that the crew may well have spent Thursday bouncing off the Troll walls to.

Now, though, the scene is forward facing, even if it’s not entirely clear what this Greek sound could become. The Anatolian tone that George speaks of feels like a project rather than an absolute, but these Greeks are the stronger for it and Six D.O.G.S. is back into its steady run of winter parties again. Panajiotis from Lower Parts puts it best: “Athens is nothing like Berlin. We will never be like Berlin, but we don’t want to be, actually. We just need to operate together. The country is small, the people are few, and the situation is difficult. But if we pull our weapons, all our possibilities, together – we can do better.”