CD - Pogus
Dimitri Voudouris is Greek, long time Johannesburg citizen, chemist, electroacoustic composer, and founder of Unyazi first African electronic music festival. He's not new to digital audio and multimedia experiments, with researches innervated with a specific attention to contemporary social and cultural phenomena. The outcome is notably vivid, considering the peculiar geographical origin that makes immaterial approaches less likely there as well as relaxed relationships with technology. He records as Npfai.1 (New Possibilities For African Instrument) and digitally processes the traditional m'bira (a.k.a. kalimba) and kundi sonorities. Kundi is a sort of ritual harp, able to articulate spaced atmospheres, loosely glitched, never too synthetically or naturally typified, directly avoiding certain improvised exoticism. There are looped tonalities, drones and harmonic tone colors deleting the non-audible frequencies in 'Palmos', a flat but extremely suggestive composition, listed just before NPFAI.3, weighed on the use of a tenor marimba that loses its percussive nature through a granular amalgam and synthetic textures. Praxis is the last track where an Orthodox male choir peeps from meticulously divided, spaced out sounds, minimally modulated in frequencies.
Aurelio Cianciotta