Spyros Polychronopoulos - Duende (2021)

It has been five years since my last solo album release.

In every release so far, I have maintained a different focus and sense of aesthetics, yet I’ve strived for the unknown as a common ground between the works. In this album every sound, except the field recordings, is produced by musical instruments I have specifically built for the needs of this project. The field recordings were mainly sounds I captured at the time of coronavirus quarantine in Athens. I made them during the day, in shops where people interacted minimally, and during the night, in the streets where people were eager to socialize.

Up to this release I used analog and digital tools to control the sound. This is the first time I built physical objects to record an album and felt that I had to dispense the need to control every small detail and in some cases let the random vibrations of the instrument lead the way. The instruments built dictated new compositional paths and these paths dictated the construction of new instruments. It was a dynamic interplay between these two mutually dependent elements: apparatus and sound.

The title Duende derives from a lecture given by Federico García Lorca in Buenos Aires in 1934. In this talk Lorca uses the word “duende” to refer to the essence of all of the works of art, the hidden element we want to touch, but that remains always unreachable. It is one of these words not only challenging to translate, but also hard to define in another language. Hence, this work Duende has its own unique existence and does not lend itself to interpretation. It can be best regarded in a constellation including my previous works.