Rekem Records presents an album of field recordings from the village of Philoti, Naxos, in the Cyclades. These recordings by anthropologists Panos Panopoulos and Yorgos Samantas offer us a tangible and pleasurable sonic image of highland Naxos, focusing on a range of acoustic stimuli that touches on the multiple aspects of everyday life, as well as those of ritual space and time, and the dynamic interplay between voices, natural sounds and music.

The material compiled sketches an acoustic profile of the land, in a narrative that presents instances that focus both on the intricate terrain of the soundscape, as well as human sonic interventions, and the resonances and interactions of music with the sonic environment. Throughout this apparent sonic journey, its sounds and their reflections, lies the imprint of the lived experience of space, in all its levels of expression.

"[...] We tried to capture the acoustic experience of the place, the clarity and the density of the village’s sonic life, the celebratory ambience of summer extroversion, the soundscapes of highland Naxos, hoping to add, through the means of sound, one more tessera to the ethnography of the place and its people". - Panos Panopoulos

"[...] Through the 15 sound captures documented in this CD, we seek to highlight a part of the auditory culture of highland Naxos that rarely finds its way into phonographic documentation. The polyrhythms of August, the paradoxical conversations, consonances and resonances occurring between “nature” and “culture”, the preparations for the "optimal sound" for the ceremony and the feast, the sounds that mark, give shape to, and are shaped by space and measure time, all of these constitute sensory events with social and cultural significance, which we hope to convey with this gesture". - Yorgos Samantas

Panayotis Panopoulos is Assistant Professor of Anthropology of Music and Dance in the Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean, Greece. His research involves music, sound and performance, deafness, sensory ethnography, as well as interactions between anthropology and contemporary art.

Yorgos Samantas is a social anthroplogist with a specific interest in listening and walking as cultural practices. He uses sound, walking, mapping, photography and video as means of expanding the boundaries of anthropological research, its expression and knowledge production. In the last decade, he has been involved in several interdisciplinary artistic projects, such as the akoo-o group, and TWIXTlab.