Nine Water Lilies from the Dead Shore

Konstantinos Bhta – one the most restless pioneers of Greek electronic music – arranges through his own eyes traditional and rebetika songs. In his work Nine Water Lilies from the Dead Shore, a musical composition bridging the past and the present, personal and collective experiences, we find four songs by Giannis Papaioannou – one of the most important figures of the rebetiko – as well as a new song by Sokratis Malamas. The work also includes K. Bhta’s original compositions that function as entry and exit points from a musical world on the edge of a memory ready to turn into oblivion or to transform. It is the first time that the work will be presented live.

Nine Water Lilies from the Dead Shore are not just songs – they are souls floating amongst us, the shadows of an old world forever lost or turned into something else. It is a lyrical evocation of Greek migration in the 20th century, of nostalgia, of loss, of the search for an identity. K. Bhta doesn’t just reproduce the songs; he chooses them, interprets them, and arranges them in his own musical voice, bridging the traditional with the electronic, the rebetiko with the contemporary, the sonant with the existential.

The result is a musical bouquet where Papaioannou’s rebetika enter in conversation with folk songs, in a simple yet charged way. Therefore, the way acquires the character of an introspection, but also from a cultural gesture of memory – a way of hearing the ‘other side’. The performance will also include songs chosen from the artist’s personal discography.