This past weekend I was in LA for the Masayoshi Takanaka concert. I arrived the morning of the day before, in order to make sure I would be in peak condition to absorb the magic that was about to take place, and boy did Takanaka-san deliver. But since I was in town for quite some time, I did what any reasonable person in LA would do: go to the La Brea Tar Pits, hike up in the Hollywood Hills, eat lots of incredible Mexican food and, of course, hit up Amoeba Music. It's a gigantic store and I figured they would have quite the collection hidden in their clearance bin for anyone with eyes to look. In these days where vinyl has become a hot commodity and it's difficult to find true gems in the US without paying an arm and a leg, the tape section is still financially your friend for the most part, while also opening you up to the possibility of finding local acts whose only recordings are on cassette in the first place.

Amoeba's tape clearance bin neatly overlapped with the "world music" section, and within that section I found this strange tape with a Greek name on it, for 50 cents. My Greek is terrible, so I gambled on the fact that whatever happened, it would at least be interesting. The result of this dig is a pretty interesting tape which offers a modernized take on Greek folk music, with the title track being almost prog-like in its delivery, which I liked a whole lot. But I think it belies a greater point about "world" music, or at least how it's perceived in the US. See, Mr. Pantazis here is one of the greatest Greek folk artists of modern times. He's sold millions of records in Greece, he's been performing for 40 years, he is greatly beloved, and here he is for 50 cents in a bargain bin because "world" music only means anything once it has gone through the eyes of a curator or a compilation which can make it worth money. This is not to harp on the work of great labels like Analog Africa, WeWantSounds, Los Palmas Music or Luaka Bop, but at the end of the day the music is treated with this disdain until it is "discovered" in a way that feels deeply colonialist. And it certainly doesn't help that in places like my own home country, we greatly value foreign music so much that our stuff still kind of feels like "world music" all the same!

The only way to get out of this loop is to share it widely and hype up everything you can, and to let the stories of the people who wrote them speak, especially if it's your own culture! That's why I've pushed so hard for Venezuelan music on this blog and will continue to in future installments. Today I learned about a living Greek legend, and I hope you also will have a good time with this tape.

...With all that said, however, it's entirely possible that the reason this is 50 cents is because it's a bootleg. The label print is of very low quality, the tape itself sounds like it had something else recorded beforehand, or it's so thin that I'm getting crosstalk from the other side, and I should make clear that this is not due to my tape deck, which is a lovely Nakamichi DR-3 that can make anything sing. Definitely a mystery.

Hey, at least when you pick this up you know it's high quality!

Liner Notes

None! There's not even a tracklist printed on this thing. Amazing.

Track List & Rip

Just because the cassette won't give you a track list doesn't mean I won't.

A1 - Έρχεται
A2 - Ό,τι Καλύτερο
A3 - Συγχώρεσέ Με
A4 - Δεν Υπάρχω
A5 - Ήξεις - Αφίξεις
B1 - Όλα
B2 - Πυρκαγιά
B3 - Γεννήθηκα Να Σ' Αγαπώ
B4 - Εσύ
B5 - Αναισθητικό

Get the rip here!