Honestly... in Conversation with IOLI

Ioli, ex: RAW SILVER, was one of the original founders of Honest Electronics, almost 10 years ago. Having spent many years living and studying in Amsterdam and Berlin, ioli returned to Cyprus and their impact is unmistakable. There are few organizers in the queer, alternative, electronic music, rave, nightlife scenes who have had more impact in the last decade than Ioli, having contributed to countless impeccable moments, eternally accompanied by equally impeccable design work.

This interview was constructed collaboratively in writing, as a way of introducing IOLI as an artist scheduled to release on ÊT/RE, as well as offering Ioli a first chance to express some thoughts about this pivotal moment, as a great deal of things are changing now for Ioli, and we hope this interview contributes to your new direction. Thank you for everything, we have hundreds upon hundreds of gigabytes of material attesting to the beautiful things you, your friends and collaborators have done. Crossdressing Diogenes kept all the receipts.

Part I: Introduction by Palais Sinclaire

The reason I wanted to talk to IOLI, one of the founders of Honest Electronics, especially at this time, is because it is within the framework of Honest Electronics that I thought through all of my writing for the past 7-8 years. I moved to Cyprus in 2018 having completed my MA in Ethnomusicology, of which the thesis oriented around the politics and sociology of rave culture and electronic music in Cyprus, where I had visited the island many times over a two-year period. Fresh out of postgraduate studies, I realised quickly that the theories I had assembled in my mind didn’t match reality, or didn’t match in the way I thought they should. Instead of the books I’d read helping me navigate my experiences over this 7-year period, the opposite happened, where the experiences I had over this period helped me better navigate what I had read.
The ‘real’ that I was using to decipher the ‘code’, to borrow terms from Baudrillard, was the rave scene in Cyprus, which became my life — I was working in a café full-time, but raving, DJing, and running a fanzine-label project in every second of my spare time. I was just going with this flow, following the parties around, getting to know the organisers, becoming friends with people; a lot of drugs, a lot of nights without sleep, and leaving shift work to go directly to the beach where a sound-system had been set up. Then when COVID happened, it became survival, I lost my job and had very little claim to any benefits, so I had to scramble my rave-scene contacts to find work, in a factory at first via one raver bestie, then at a bar run by someone from the scene, who also had the only club in town. I had to take every gig I could find, any bartending shift. By the end of this, I was so integrated with and dependent upon this scene, that the kind of questions I would ask in my thesis, such as “what is the nature of this scene” changed a lot in my mind—from an idealistic position to a materialist position.
I had observed within the raving community what I could call ‘micro-politics’, or break-away, self-sustaining miniature societies. The Gathering, the annual festival put on by Honest Electronics was its own miniature political structure within the broader political structure of Honest Electronics. Such an event required everything from organising food, water, fuel, building infrastructure, becoming familiar with the terrain, managing finances and the micro-economy of The Gathering which is integrated in the macro-economy of Honest Electronics, organising and training volunteers, paying workers, building community values like trust, learning how to practice accountability and respond to emergencies. All of this had to happen against the pressures of the establishment, which, while claiming to be European in the secular neoliberal sense, was quite fundamentalist — the church holds claim to everything, owning even the beers that ravers drink on Sunday mornings.
You could end up spending two weeks in the 45-degree heat of July, sharing resources while you build the festival, and after just a few days in the heat, Kampia, the festival grounds, becomes your whole world, and that is, in many ways, the whole point.
The scene is as real as the world is, but how real the world is, is a question that only Baudrillard can answer. Baudrillard had this idea about ritualism being a methodology or practice of forging the symbols that our world is made of — these underground raves acted like furnaces where symbols could be smelted down into raw materials and refashioned. There are meanings and values that seem as static as a stone, but the secret is that they can be altered; Good/Evil, Man/Woman, Us/Them, all of these dualisms can be altered, managed, confronted, dissolved, the world can be changed.
This brings me to the interview with IOLI. While we have known each other for more than 8-years, and have acquired an enduring respect for each other, the main reason for me to interview IOLI is because it is within their world that I did so much of my thinking. When it comes to the Cypriot rave scene from 2008-2023, I am a mega-fan, and I find it ceaselessly fascinating to observe how so many contradictions can be negotiated, politically, aesthetically, and culturally.

Part II: Conversation

Palais Sinclaire:
So, the Honest Electronics I knew for so long has been rebooted, and to signify this new era for the collective, the catalogue numbers have been reset to 1. As an opening move, can you give us a quick overview of the situation?

IOLI:
What is a wave without a destination? Nothing! I’d like to personally thank you for your effort in documenting the last 7 years, most of the time on paper, but also in the membranes and clusters of your mind and heart. You remind me of a neutrino observatory, sensitive enough to feel all ripples, smart enough to document them. To give a summary of the outset, when we started this (in the years just before you first showed up) we wanted to make an entity or organisation that brought together, promoted and archived the local electronic sound, of Cyprus, of Nicosia, and so on, but we knew that it was necessary that this entity also created a stage for that sound—a ground. It started this way, with Honest Electronics Records acting as the archival machinery or mechanism for the content, and The Gathering, along with the rest of our events, the stage.
Between 2016 and 2020, we put out 24 releases, and I can only describe this period of the label as an instinctive era. I was abroad a lot—I only came back in 2019—I would talk to people in Berlin about our scene back home, but had very little to show for it. In order for our community and our sound to be either demonstrated, recognised or empowered, we would need to find a way to better represent ourselves in the otherwise deeply saturated “abroad”. We were, in this period, struggling against the reality of the music industry, operating without distribution or promotion, and most of the times without any physical existence; this first chapter, the building of these networks and locale-specific strategies and so on, has been an important collective milestone of the scene.
Even though I came back a year before COVID hit, I was fortunate to be able to experience a full annual cycle of the scene at that time, or what it was becoming at that time; the scene was blooming, albeit in a rather eerie, or precarious setup that seemed to be contradicting itself, or folding, all the time. When COVID hit, everything stopped for a while, and it actually took us 4 years to create a new release. By then so many things had changed in the world—a completely new generation, different/faster styles—but also internally, we changed, evolved, and grew up. It only made sense to think this new beginning as a new chapter.
In this chapter the label is run by individuals who are also the artists of this label, such as Tasos Lamnisos (x.ypno), Kassiani Kappelos (Kasska) and Constantinos Avgousti (sixonesix), who, alongside me, organise everything: the audio, the image, the distribution, promotion and many other of the micro tasks that constitute a record label. A diffe-rent crew is in charge of the parties and festivals which includes Alexis Anthony Ambrose, Loukas Koumantaris and myself.

PS:
Something that I have learned through watching Honest Electronics involves dualisms, from the Archive/Stage, to Honest/Dishonest, to Live/DJ, and so on, and I have always been impressed by how you manage these contradictions as you call them. For example, Honest Electronics was never just DJs, even though you could always fill a rave line-up; the record label reflected something quite different, it wasn’t “rave music”. It was always interesting every year to watch what Honest Electronics would do to accommodate everyone. On first thoughts, it could seem difficult to put, say, Morion on the same line-up as Ayios Loizos, but you did, either literally or figuratively—me playing after you at The Gathering 8, on the other stage, at the turn of sunrise was also a choreographed rotation. I could say, in the best of spirit, that we have as DJs played very different things, so this “contradiction” being turned into a “pivot” was an elegant way of managing difference.

I:
We understood early on that electronic music has many faces, many applications, whether about different hours of the day, or other, bigger picture things. We understood the complexity and spectrum of electronic music and also how the artists in our reach were a deep, rich tapestry; the “our sound” that we wanted to stage wasn’t one singular thing. Our compilations, Mutual Ground(s), Now That’s What I Call H.E.R. and the Dishonest Sampler were brave examples of this curation and understanding of spectrums.
Having said that, this multifaceted idea was, of course, not something we invented; it was an international festival language that we understood. Applying this in Cyprus was nonetheless challenging—though also very meaningful. Even when it comes to the climate, as you know the sun isn’t a joke here, and it has a lot of influence on what we’re doing, musically, as the temperature swerves rapidly up to 45ºC. We learned to adapt with it, we learned over time what we enjoy doing and hearing in these different moments.
We, unquestionably, made a lot of mistakes, and honestly, we still do. Ambitious plans are fragile and sometimes arrogant. It takes a lot of energy to plan something like this, to put it out there, believe in it and then make others believe in it too. And, as hard as it is to make, it’s much harder to communicate. Contradicting the status-quo means you are introducing an unknown form to the crowd, so you have to be methodical and patient, you have to introduce a lot of different things at once, inspire both the artists and the crowd and keep the collective rhythm going. The complexity of this is something that excites me deeply.

PS:
With that in mind, what are you thinking with the label reboot?

I:
The record label’s concept is simple and it’s the same as it was in the beginning: we want to capture moments in the Cypriot scene. By doing so we felt like we are saving precious memories that no other foundation or organisation was archiving at the moment. In the first chapter, which ended in 2020, we were much more intuitive and spontaneous with it, while being quite naive and oblivious to the expectations of the industry. So, in a way our catalog is a snapshot album of what was happening during that period in the local scene.
This is something we are developing in our second chapter, so while keeping things leftfield, we want to polish and be mindful. At this moment we are debating and studying approachability. We are very interested in underground pop music and how it borrows both from the magic of mainstream and the allure of the underground.

PS:
Well, the dichotomy of Pop/Underground may well be annulled by the emergence of AI, because with AI music may come a future term “human music”.

I:
When it comes to AI I can say this. My “pain profession” is graphic design, so I’ll take that as an example. Maybe AI makes things faster, although I find myself working the same amount of hours. It’s hardly going to generate exactly what you need, so you have to keep doing more and more, and with this workflow you can get lost in the endless sea of possibilities and choices. Maybe in the near future an AI bot can tell you what to choose as well, but even then, the final decision will be carried by you, the human. Everything is still about the input, and the curation of the output—perhaps now we’ll need to use our brains even more, as a lot of the manual work will be taken away from us, just as it has been long before AI (outsourcing the manual labour to machines). I have had to learn so many new AI techniques this year, not just with something like MidJourney. I have had to learn about Stable Diffusion, go to school for new software. None of these things feel automated or faster, they’re just new tools, arguably better tools. I believe we’ll see and hear a lot of great things.
While it feels like it’s out of control, there’s a lot of corporate attention being paid, as we speak right now, to seal away copyrights. There are endless tools being developed to decipher what is made with AI, for example, and currently there are websites where you can upload an image and it will give you exactly all the references the AI used to put together an image. This will catch up with music too, although with music, I’m tempted to say that we’ve already become AI by ourselves. Most tracks out there still use the same 808 or 909 samples as the pioneers used 20-30 years ago, so sampling-wise, it is all a constant remix of a remix. What matters, or what can make a track stand out, however, is still the composition, the choices, the soul in it, how it relates to the current trends and culture; all of these things are still very human.

PS:
That’s a very agreeable answer. I am deeply curious about the AI tools that will come for music. We can move into a question more directly related to your own output. You were RAW SILVER for as long as I knew you, and I think by the time I left, you had only tested IOLI twice, once at Dishonest Rave, and once at The Gathering 8 — I played next to you on both occasions, before you at the first, after you at the second. For obvious reasons, I’m curious what you have been up to since I left?

I:
Well, my 2nd ever studio album allo lio, which is also the debut for IOLI, was released on the 5th of July on H.E.R. after 4 years in the making. While in the past I spent a lot of years experimenting with sound as an abstract form, for this album I decided to use what I have learned to try and create a very approachable, almost pop, album. It was inspired by an old love which I really wanted to document, express, and create an output for. Four years later, in love with somebody else, I’m fascinated by how the spirit of love that some of these tracks contain has been translated into something else for me over time and over transitions, it made me confident that this is a very universal and relatable album that I’m very proud of.

PS:
Then on the flipside, you have the work you’ve done for ÊT/RE, VENEXIA, it’s one of the follow up EPs that make-up a cluster of releases around the main album allo lio.

I:
VENEXIA came after visiting Venice last spring. I was born, raised, and currently live and work in Nicosia, a city that came under Venetian rule in the late 15th century and was significantly influenced by its governance. The visit really made me see my hometown differently.
The tracks on this EP are highly detailed dance pieces, and while the atmosphere is dramatic or operatic, and much attention is on storytelling, the pieces still largely work with the 160 BPM techno format, and include trance-like sampling. I used a lot of field recordings which I made in Venice: sounds of the crowds, ship horns, baroque music, choirs, and motets.
I wanted to document my impressions of Venice. I created almost an hour of sound the first week I came back, and then I let it sit. When I started editing again a few weeks later, I was very much back in Nicosia, both physically and mentally, but it felt like a different, more Venetian Nicosia than I was before my trip. I was very inspired by the story of Queen Caterina Cornaro, the Venetian Queen of Cyprus, and I was deeply influenced by the Venetian architecture and culture that was left behind by the Venetians, including the walls of Nicosia. In a reflective way, this is a historical release for me; it recounts tales of the past while I re-examine the colonial aesthetics of my own city.