one more drive w/ Savvas Metaxas

Seeing NTS's call to create a mix with music that describes our roots, the place we come from and most likely the place we tend to return to, I immediately thought how difficult and challenging that could be. I remembered Winnicott's saying that 'Home is where we start from' and automatically went back in time and wondered what music was playing and continues to play in my head over time. Adding to this thought a kind of musical genealogy and a sense of nostalgia, I created this mix during a period when I was quite a few miles away from home. The beginning and end are dedicated to family. Music of the people of Pontus and the Black Sea (father) and music with clarinets and mountain laments (mother). From there on, the first half of the mix is Greek. With Thessaloniki being the place where I started from, there is Trypes, the biggest Greek-speaking rock band, and Ziggy Was, the biggest Greek English-speaking band. Both bands are from Thessaloniki. "You live to die" by Arnakia has been played so many times on my teenage stereo that it has definitely shaped me. Arleta was frequently played on my uncle's record player, which subconsciously shaped my musical consciousness from the age of 5 onwards. Although I am not a fan of rap music, LEX's songs praise the city of Thessaloniki and are my remedy for my frequent bouts of nostalgia lately. The second half of the mix attempts to describe very briefly, due limited time, the music that has shaped my own artistic approach in recent years. Pan American and Alva Noto, Bonnie Prince Billy and Sonic Youth (I remember almost their entire live performance in Thessaloniki on Valentine's Day in 1999), and more recently Oren Ambarchi could not be left out. Our roots are old, but they exist mainly for the benefit of our future. As Italian psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati says, 'Memory should not, in fact, be limited to passive worship of the past, but we must learn to use memory to create our future'.