Costis Drygianakis & Matt Atkins // Late April TAPE

It is quite possible, if not certain, that any biographical entry will refer to Costis Drygianakis as an experimental musician. We would do the same. He himself, in a recent article of his regarding the meaning, or more precisely, the definition of experimental music, goes as far as to question even the very existence of experimental music itself. We linger on a sentence in Costis' text, one which we read over and over: “The experiment, in every way, is connected to the present”. Let’s hold that thought. Since the first days of the label, we were certain that we would someday propose a collaboration between Costis Drygianakis and Coherent States, for reasons that are, in a nutshell, summed up in the vast admiration we have for his work over the years, from his rather improvisational project Optical Musics (1984-1994) and our all time favorite ambience of "Hours and Seasons" cassette (1992) to the eerie ghosts of his “Blown Into Breeze” LP (2013). It was always bound to happen. And as with all appropriate moments, it didn’t come until it came. When we were holed up in our homes. Literally. At the end of April. In the present. In the place to where the experiment must be connected in every way.

Matt Atkins is a sound artist / experimentalist / owner of Minimal Resource Manipulation label / percussionist / photographer from London, who specializes in loops, found sounds, contact microphones and imprinting emotions borne from landscapes and sounds he has experienced into his own music. Just as it happened on his trip to India, in January 2020, when few things foreshadowed a savage present of social distancing. The conversations of two restless spirits during troubled times is perhaps the only presence in which the experiment provides results. “Late April” is the outcome of this artistic communication between Marathos and London, via mail, and one that finds the two artists reworking each other’s sounds, each on a side of the cassette. The result herein, like a beautiful surprise, heralds Costis’ return to an -abandoned for a while- electro-acoustic composition, with four tracks on side C which are in direct communication with the fragile and deconstructed melodiousness of Matt’s four tracks on side M of the cassette. The dialogue between the two is intense, lost in a harmonious coexistence of hazy and blurry sounds where it’s often exquisitely difficult to distinguish whose part preceded and whose followed.