f36 J

ust like Odysseus’ journey back to Ithaca after the Trojan War took a decade, the album took ten years to complete, having been recorded in Veroia, Thessaloniki, Athens, Spain and London, as that’s where the various musicians were located. I’m lucky I don’t have to wait that long to meet them, as one lives in Spain and the other travels between Greece and London.

Dubulah greets me at the door; we’d first met at Womad at his Syriana concert and again at Islington Town Hall for another Syriana gig. Immediately I feel like I’m at home, I take my shoes off and sit down in the kitchen. We’re in singer Lucinda Sieger’s home, who is great friends with Nick ‘Dubulah’ Page and Jimi ‘Ahetas’ Pap- atzanateas, the two people who masterminded Xaos. The plan was to go out somewhere for our interview but after introductions are made in Greek and English, we decide to stay in the cosy kitchen – that’s where all great conversations happen at any party anyway. We end up having coffee and tea around the kitchen table, surrounded by books, CDs, sketchbooks and paintings that cover walls and shelf spaces. It’s not crowded: on the contrary we could not have found a better place for our chat, with a big window overlooking a courtyard in central London.

Dubulah’s and Ahetas’ album is what happens when you open

that window. Light, sounds and space flood in. Imagine a score to an experience of landscape and beautiful scenery in pictures. “I’m not really an ambient sound music composer, it’s more a microtone chaotic kind of abstract concept of sounds, it’s very cinematic,” Ahetas explains as he taps his chest just above the heart. He is the more silent man, a Greek philosopher who chooses his words wisely.

Their album is “about very big spaces, to show the natural space and human space,” and he adds “well, I believe in space and I believe in sharing space and being creative within space and giving everybody the happiness to exist in space without restrictions and be able to be creative.”

Ahetas is a Greek composer, performer and painter, via Aus-

tralia, whose artist name means ‘sound maker’ in ancient Greek. Dubulah is half Greek and half English: he’s been involved in making crossover world music and fusion for quite a long time – and pop music, avant-garde music and even bad jazz, he tells me. Ahetas has worked with Apeiron, Syriana, Project Dark and Temple Of Sound to mention a few, and Dubulah has produced and worked with Dub Colossus, Syriana, Transglobal Underground, Natacha Atlas, Jah Wobble, Los De Abajo, Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali and the UK’s first all Asian female punk band, the Voodoo Queens, among others.

W

ith a CV like theirs you’d think doors would open, but not in Greece it seems. Getting any exposure or funding for Xaos has been impossi- ble in a country where the majority of the media only serves commercial and political interests.

Keep in mind that the public service broadcaster ERT only recently reopened after being illegally shut down for several years by the Nea Dimokratia and Samaras government in 2013, who told Greeks it was wasting state money. In fact, ERT was earning money for the state through the licence fee, while its radio and TV programmes were offering information, education and diverse entertainment to Greek people and the diaspora. While young people and those with the internet read news and get informed via blogs and alternative online radio and news sites, the mainstream media has a set agen- da. In it, you won’t find alternative voices, art or music.

“If you want to diminish a country’s importance, the first thing you do is say it has nothing to offer. We’re trying to make a point, that there has to be an alternative blueprint and something that can work in the world concept. I think there’s a new generation of young Greek people coming up with internet; the internet con- sciousness is changing their view of Greece and of their place in the world,” Dubulah says, somewhat hopefully, before he continues.

“It’s appalling the way Greece is represented, and the way Greece and Greek businesses and the state don’t help that and the Greek individuals with money don’t help that, there is no support for anyone. We financed this ourselves; who would finance something like this? But if it suddenly appeared in a lot of films in Hollywood, there’d be someone knocking at my door from Greece, offering a lot