I think we’ve been hearing Nikos Veliotis, the excellent Greek cellist-improviser, since 2003 if not earlier. I recall being mightily impressed when he played with Coti K as Texturizer, splicing live cello drone with electronics. He’s here with Alex Zethson today and they produced the two long tracks on Cryo (THANATOSIS PRODUKTION THT37) in the studio in 2019, after they met up in Athens at a gig in the Underflow venue.
They’ve gone for the “sonic blend” approach, with Zethson brewing lower-register mumbles and clusters on his piano, and the cellist merging himself into the vaporous emissions. Like a Samuel Beckett play, ‘Cryo I’ starts out agitated and anxious, as if the two musicians had recast themselves as Vladimir and Estragon and sought to find a way out of the eternal dilemma, but – also like Beckett – it ends up as a black cloud of musical despair, paralysed by grief. I like this slow march into miserable abstraction, beginning as pro-active improvisation hammers and stabs, then collapsing into pitch-black anti-ambient fields. From ‘Cryo II’, the surface sound is more approachable, but also more diffuse; a gigantic grey cloud of rain is your portion; the urgency of the moment is somehow missing.
Press blurb points out that the mastering was done by Mell Dettmer, who worked on Earth and Sunn O))) records, and thus clearly has the right credentials for solving the tricky audio riddles created by heavy drone music. Vinyl pressing also exists. (05/02/2025)