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Athena
Making their debut at The Big Chill, Athena open with a song that means buisness. The double bass mixed with her heavenly voice create a sinister sound that accompany sinister lyrics. her greek roots shine through in songs such as 'wooden horse' based on greek mythology. when she brings in piano her voice is recognised even more for its perfection. smooth music with some very strange vocal experiments at points.Clare Rixon on Athena at The Big Chill 2006
Athena - Biography
For an unsigned artist, the buzz about Athena has been quite extraordinary. Fans and the media use words like ‘beguiling' and ‘breathtaking' to describe not only her exceptional voice but also songwriting that seamlessly draws on her Greek and English roots in a unique and mesmerising way.
Now, sold out London concerts, treasured demo recordings, national radio sessions and appearances at festivals like Womad have all paved the way for a high-profile national tour, commencing January 11th and funded by ArtsCouncil England. All this, and yet she's only now releasing her first independently produced CD EP. Born in London, Athena (pronounced A-thin-aaah) Andreadis moved to Greece when her parents returned there shortly after she was born. Growing up in a decidedly Anglophile household, Athena was exposed not only to Greek music and culture via her mother's singing and records but also a diverse wealth of British and American sounds.
As Athena recently told the BBC's World On Your Street: "I learned orally until I was 20. My mother had the most incredible voice; she used to sing me lullabies and there was such variety of music in the house. But I was essentially self-taught. Throughout my teens I was always singing, making up vocal exercises to teach myself... ". From her musical family, in the widest sense, she heard all kinds of music from PinkFloyd and the Beatles to Keith Jarrett and classical music to the music of Manos Hadjidakis, a seminal Greek composer at the forefront of modern Greek culture in the ‘60s and ‘70s. "Later on", she says, "I also became interested in the songs of the immigrants who ended up on the mainland after the catastrophe of their forced departure from Asia Minor. Those songs are full of the pain of the displaced Greek and I connected with that".
Asked about specific singers she was inspired to emulate early on, Athena told fRoots magazine: "It's funny but there was no one. I always felt I sounded different when I was younger, as I'd open my mouth and this voice would come out, unlike any I'd heard. But I was also fascinated by it. An untamed horse being released! I always knew this is what I wanted to do and that there was something special there. My instinct told me anyway, as there was no one else to tell me or encourage me at first." She also grew up speaking both Greek and English fluently.
"Some days", she says "I wake up and my day is in Greek, some days in English. As I spend more time in the U.K., English tends to dominate my daily life". Rather than being a somewhat schizophrenic state of affairs, it works perfectly because Athena treats the Greek and English parts ofher life as polarities of a unified cultural experience. It's easy to hear thisin her songs: the way she moves from English to Greek and back again makes for a seamless repertoire. Whatever language she is singing in, Athena's voice projects a deep longing which partly comes from her ancestors' suffering and longing to return to their homeland and partly from the longing to be complete in a spiritual sense. "As a teenager," she remembers, "I really wanted to go abroad. I'd built up such an image of England. I was hungry for new experiences. Yet when I came here I missed Greece - the landscape, the people and most of all the music, so I began to explore my roots afresh. Living here in the U.K. made me appreciate Greece more, just as living in Greece made me appreciate the U.K. more... Now I'm beginning to realise that my home is with me, wherever I go or choose to live."
"Ultimately I'm inspired by my love for nature, my nostalgia for the landscapes of Greece, the mountains, the light which is beautiful, and the sea which is always in my heart," she says. "When I'm writing and singing I can almost smell the earth and the sea... And the other thing that inspires me is when I meet people like the guys in my group - musicians who've got something to say and want to share it."Yet at one time, Athena looked set to reluctantly follow a business path rather than a musical one. Her businessman father persuaded her to take a commerce degree and follow him into the family business. During a six-month work placement in New York, however, Athena auditioned for evening singing lessons with a teacher from the Juilliard School of Music who instantly recognised the talent and abilities latent in the young singer. "That teacher really gave me the wings to fly," she recalls. "She felt there wasa lot to come out of me and believed in me".
Returning to London, Athena auditioned for, and secured a place to study, two post-graduate degreesat Trinity College of Music. The training at this prestigious educational establishment was rigorous and intense but it gave Athena all the skills she was looking for. She studied voice: jazz and classical("covering all kinds of styles from early music through opera, lieder, contemporary and jazz") and worked her way through various differing approaches to the folk, acoustic, traditional, contemporary,electronica, jazz and classical vocabularies. She also started writing her own music, experimenting with performing her own material with a variety of musicians from different traditions and backgrounds, and exploring the possibilities of co-writing with other talented songwriters.
In early 2005 she decided to focus on working with just two from her group of regularly collaborating musicians, guitarist Werner Kristiansen and bassist Tom Mason, who seem to provide the perfect platform for her unique songs and voice. "Three is a magic number I think and I feel really comfortablewith these guys, that I can express myself very naturally and we communicate so well." she says. Public awareness of Athena has grown rapidly: there's a tangible buzz. Many who hear her beguiling voiceand music tend to become devoted fans. Following well received sets on events like Radio 3's Europe In Union concert series, her first headlining London concert at the South Bank's Purcell Room in December 2004 sold out. Sessions for BBC Radio 3's Andy Kershaw and BBC London's Charlie Gillett helped spread the word beyond the metropolis.
www.athenaandreadis.com
Written: 10th Aug, 06
Read: 4341 times
