Calliope

Madchenblumen

Label: Submersion Records

Genre: Electronica / Ambient / Experimental

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CALLIOPE is an Athens-(plant)-based musician and performer. She experiments with her opera and classical music background, through synths, effect pedals, chaotic loops and textures.

Mädchenblumen means flower girls.
Cornflowers, Poppies, Ivies and Lilies are the four categories of women as suggested by Felix Dahn in his collection of poems titled “Mädchenblumen”, set to music by Richard Strauss in 1888. Polite, pure, kind, with untainted souls -whatever that means-, quiet, patient, weak, harmless, cute, easygoing, humble, tireless, without any self confidence, dependent on others, but also unique, ideal, peaceful, precious, ethereal, dreamy and irresistible.

In 2023, CALLIOPE sets to music the same collection of poems. As an experiment at first, she tries to put herself and the women that raised her, in one of the four categories offered by Dahn. And she fails. She goes back to her grandfather's plant nursery, to her uncle’s field, to her father’s greenhouse, to the flower shop her mother used to work and to her grandmother’s vegetable garden. Nature as a place of meeting and recreation, as something comforting but at the same time a product to buy or sell, to use and control.

Bass, harmonies, vocals, recordings from her place of birth, interview outtakes, narrative “loans” from Greek and world plays, distortions, noise and texture, they all make up a music collage-bouquet. A music attempt to approach femininity, gender identity, beauty, rage, freedom and forgiveness.

Sometimes she is a Cornflower (Kornblumen).
Other times, a Poppy (Mohnblumen).
Maybe others, she's an Ivvy (Epheu).
And not very often she is a Lilly (Wasserrose). But it is never just one of them.

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