? — Mystiki Fleva & Palais Sinclaire, ?th December 2024

Music, the Ocean & Man: in Conversation with Mystiki Fleva



Antonia Kattou is a scholarly musician and researcher based in Cyprus, a razor-sharp musicologist doing a multidisciplinary Ph.D on “the ‘post-’ in post-folk". This research encapsulates a lot of areas that are highly applicable to this magazine issue, and despite that this conversation was organized and conducted relatively late in the process of the magazine, it ended up being a highly formative interview, covering religion, music culture, human displacement, migration, and generational trauma. We are particularly happy with this interview, it is very touching and close to our hearts, and so we wish to extend a lot of gratitude to Antonia for taking the time to produce this interview with us.  

This interview was conducted online in July 2024, not long after we saw Antonia's release of May You Live in Interesting Times live in Berlin. It was conducted via Zoom, from Berlin to Nicosia, then transcribed and edited collaboratively.


           PALAIS SINCLAIRE:
So, I want to begin by setting the scene a little bit: we were both living in Nicosia, which is very small, and we kept bumping into each other, and, at some point, we realised that we were both in the Ethnomusicology pathway; likely the “only two” in Cyprus, or at least that is how it felt. Nevertheless, by the time I moved to Berlin, we hadn’t managed to find a chance to talk. With that in mind, I’d like to circle back to the beginning and stage that first conversation, as I have been interested in your recordings from the first time that I heard them, and do not know anywhere near enough about them. So, let’s talk about Mystiki Fleva (ΜΦ), and start with that first recording you released as this alias: Sound Adaptations of Rebetika Tsimpita. That was the first, right?

          MYSTIKI FLEVA:
Mystiki Fleva, as a name, actually started last year, but Sound adaptations of Rebetika Tsimpita happened around four years ago. I did my studies in Ethnomusicology, as you mentioned, and I “specialised” in, well, I wrote my thesis on women in Rebetiko, so I was always thinking about these kind of adaptations—getting Rebetiko songs and changing them. This was how I was properly reintroduced into the movement. 
           Prior to this, my family, being Greek-identifying Cypriot people, naturally, listened to this music.
           They had Rebetiko records in their collection, and I even had a grandfather who was playing with Mary Linda, Manolis Chiotis... this more ‘entexno laiko’ Greek in the 60s. His family was living in Canada, so we had a connection there, and I only found this out later on. The other connection was my grandmother, who studied Physical Education in Athens in the 50s, and her curriculum often involved learning Greek dances, but they were not allowed to learn the Rebetiko dances because it was part of the underground – in general they weren’t allowed at all to study Rebetiko.

          PS:
Let me just interject two questions here, for context. You mention about women in Rebetiko, were there gendered roles in Rebetiko or was it exclusionary of women? 

          MF:
I have found through my research that, yes, Rebetiko has these particular gender roles: a very patriarchal figure of the man, staged in the centre, who is the crook(?) who sings. He is a man who needs to survive, and who protects his mother, who represents as “the idol”. Yet, when it comes to other women, there is this opposite treatment. When it comes to love and romance, this male figure is very hurt. 

          PS:
So, there is a split of the feminine into “Mother” and “Seductress” archetypes?

          MF:
Yes, but then also there is this tertiary figure of the sister, who when at home is treated as an extension of the mother, someone who is to be protected. However, when she falls in love, or when the brother finds out that she is seeing someone, the brother is allowed to kill the sister. It’s really strange — there is this song by Skarvelis, who talks about the brother killing the sister when he finds out she is seeing a man... He is in exile, in this song, asking for forgiveness from his mother. 

          PS:
Right, that is really something to imagine. The other thing you mentioned was that Rebetiko was “underground” - in what sense?

          MF:
We have this information that, historically, Rebetiko, or rather the people, the refugees, who brought Rebetiko with them, came from Smyrna after the Greco-Turkish war and the Smyrna Catastrophe. A lot of refugees came to Thessaloniki, to Athens and Pireaus, and being refugees, they were singing the music that they were singing back home. Coming from Smyrna, there is this clear Anatolian style, so the Greeks didn’t want to have anything to do with these people, or with this sound, so both the communities and their music were marginalised. 

          PS:
So even though it would be sung in Greek after a certain point, it was seen as a kind of illegitimately Greek?

          MF:
Yes, and this is a particularly interesting thing, because at some point during this time, Greece abandoned its “big idea”— η μεγάλη ιδέα—which was to recapture all the lands they felt they had lost to the Turkish Empire, but without any success in all of these conflicts and wars, they realised they had to let go of the big idea. Generally speaking, this happened in the period following the First World War, Balkan wars and Greco-Turkish war, leading to the period of Europeanisation. It was in this time, I think it was in the 40s, that Metaxas, the dictator of Greece, asks Vasilis Tsitsanis to take this Rebetiko music and change it, and make it more “European”. So, we have Tsitsanis, who was more educated in Classical, Western music, taking Rebetiko and making it more European, certainly compared to Vamvakaris. 
          At this point I would like to note that there is also an interesting distinction between how these singers are remembered from these periods: for Marko Vamvakaris, who we just call “Markos”, the songs of Markos—symbolising familiarity—and on the other hand we called Vasilis Tsitsanis by his second name, “Tsitsanis”, the songs of Tsitsanis. You can see the class distinction here, and the distinction in where they come from. 
          So, coming back to the question, I was talking a lot with my grandmother about these things, and I suppose I became attached to Rebetiko music during the first years of high school when I heard Imam Bailti and Gadjo Dilo, these arrangements of Rebetiko songs, and I thought “hey, I know these songs, what is this song, why do I know this?” — it was these songs that my grandmother used to listen to. That’s when I really started to take an interest in how we take these songs and change them, how we define the limits of these songs and so on. 

Sound Adaptations of Rebetika (SAoR) came in while I was in Glasgow, which was during COVID, so I was expatriated temporarily, and found myself, to some extent, in the shoes of the displaced person longing to be home, longing for my grandmother and the memories of this music, and so on. 
          I started wanting to know more about the American-side of Rebetiko because it had all this symbolism of the ships and the sea and how people migrate, because, after all, I was there, in Glasgow, in the U.K., which is also an Island, and my family was back in Cyprus, another island, so, yes, I was thinking a lot about these migratory connections between all these different places, the movement of people, particularly by ship, and how this happens throughout history, where we find ourselves cut off from each other, time and time again, in the same places. 

          PS:
Yes, I could imagine that this allowed you to empathise more with this aspect of Rebetiko, as a music made by displaced people. One thing that has changed, we hope, since this time, is the politics of gender, and it is interesting to think about that question of what if Rebetiko had been more inclusive of women - that is something that can be explored now. 

          MF:
Yes. During this project I was talking a lot with Antonis Hadjiantonis, who is now working with the alias ecati. He also studied Ethnomusicology, in France, at Sorbonne, and he was also listening to Rebetiko and interested in the American repertoire, which we call Tsimpita (plucked) in Greek. I was talking with him a lot about these kinds of what if questions: what if Kostis Bezos could have an electric guitar in the 30s or 40s, for example. There is definitely a sense of this in SAoR, of taking this Rebetiko idea and extending it, reorganising elements of it, and re-interpreting it.

          PS:
Well, this is really nice—and I can say as someone who has never really listened to Rebetiko, and who somehow avoided engagement with Greek music altogether despite being an Ethnomusicologist who lived in Cyprus for more than 5 years—and for reasons that are becoming more-clear, I keep coming back to your recordings a lot. What I want to say is that I do not identify in anyway with Greece, as your grandmother would, and yet I find it very evocative and personal, very moving; I can feel as though I understand and relate to the work. Can you talk me through the recordings a little bit?

          MF:
I was working a lot with text setting—how we take text and lyrics and work with them, how we place them into music and how we think about text and music in general. So, I was working a lot with text setting, specifically in regard to how we take what is written already, that has been there for decades, and how we can take a part of it and make it ours, how we recontextualise it in a new temporality.
          For example, in the first track Tell Us About Your Pain, there is a sample from the original song Kai giati den mas to les by Giorgos Katsaros which I took from the vinyl directly; it is a sample of Katsaros singing. In this track, Antonis was playing the guitar, we were working in this back-and-forth way, with online meetings and exchanging projects. In this repertoire, the guitar is played in a very specific way; a kind of picking guitar style, and you always have the bass on top with the melody underneath. It’s just one guitar but it sounds like two, so we were talking about that a lot, as well as the contrast between this and the other Rebetiko repertoire, where two people play guitar, which has a way obfuscating what was going on in a really interesting way. It was harder for people to know precisely what was going on with the guitar parts. This repertoire extends from Kostis Bezos, a guy with a very interesting background: middle-class, journalist, and writing Rebetiko songs, but very theatrical lyrics: “I pass by your house, and I smell garlic, and it reminded me of you”. This style of imagery, lyricism and storytelling was very different to the majority of Rebetiko. 

          PS:
I can hear this within the work, as you take Rebetiko out of the context of the post-Greco-Turkish war period, and place it into the context of COVID-19, 2022, a time that could be characterised by a shared global experience, but paradoxically, a shared experience of disconnection—the world was unified in its disconnectedness. I find this in your work, a sense of all these disconnected layers coming together as one thing, but a thing that is highly characterised by these disconnected layers, or by the fragility of the whole as it flickers in and out — it’s really experienced as a metastable superposition. 

          MF:
When talking about this kind of layering, that you describe as feeling “as disconnected as it does connected”, it actually goes all the way back to my music classes, when I was younger, because I was doing a lot of Baroque music, and my first tutor at that point (early teenager) was Iakos Demetriou, who himself has a Ph.D in choral music from the Venetian School of Choral Music. We were doing a lot of Baroque and Choral music, and so it’s kind of natural to have all these layers that run horizontally rather than in this vertical harmonic structure. 
          This is also a relevant point to the other track you picked out, wound without a tear, the one with the Orthodox singing, because this piece is, again, an extension of my interest in choral arrangements, although this time much more personal, with the voice coming through the locality of Cyprus. I was grieving for my grandmother at the time, so this lead to a more personal expression, and I felt these elements could come together even despite the notable distance between Rebetiko and the Orthodox Church. It was precisely because my grandmother was this woman, with Rebetiko on the one side, and yet very Greek-oriented on the other—Sooo Greek—which includes a very religious streak. I’d say open-religious, but definitively religious, she would do different kinds of things, like yoga, for example, but she was, ultimately and resolutely, a follower of Jesus Christ. [I found recently one of her very funny Jesus statues, look at this, it’s the catholic Jesus.] So, you know, that’s how the elements of Orthodox singing and Rebetiko come together in the album.

          PS:
Yes, that is great, the two otherwise “contradictory” elements of Rebetiko and Greek Orthodoxy found resolution in your grandmother, so there would be no reason why you couldn’t bring these sounds together into the musical space of your sound experiments.
          For some reason, I have your work associated with either a partial or an engaged interest in ecological thinking, and while you describe the harmonic or staging as horizontal, I would be almost tempted to use the word spherical, or at least it goes towards sphericality. Let’s say, for example, that the pieces have these independent layers that do move together in some sense, but also float freely, creating very natural dynamics that swell and fade. What I mean to say is, to talk about your work we need to use words that relate to ecological thinking: space, superposition, systems. The work holds together like the world does, simultaneously like a paradoxical supernatural-clockwork.

          MF:
I have always been thinking of space, I have thought about ecosystems, perhaps not literally, though it is very interesting now that you say that. Certainly, when it comes to staging voices within a space, and thinking about how these sounds all move around together in the space, [as one would have to think of how the sound of a choir would fill the space, a church for example]. I have increasingly referenced and incorporated Cypriot topography, place and wildlife within my music, often positioning humans as inseparable from a wider natural-cultural ecosystem. This kind of ‘ecological’ or ‘spherical thinking’, as you call it, both reflects and shapes issues of locality and place in Cypriot music. These tropes of (Cypriot) folk music as ‘close to nature’ are variously demarcated or blurred in such thinking. In addition, folk musicians use their music to present a critical perspective on explicitly environmental and political issues, addressing in particular the historical and current relationships between ‘humans’ and ‘nature’.

          PS:
Another reason why I wanted to bring up ecological thinking with you specifically, was because I wanted to get your take on the topic of World Building, which is a theme in this issue, at least as far as it extends from the editor’s letter. I feel that there is a difference between a “soundscape” and a “sound-world” (as a kind of symbolic ecosystem). 
          I have to be a bit anecdotal here, but hear me out. Having dwelled in Cyprus for a fairly long period of time, I have developed a lot of attachments to the Island. I have internalised something about Cyprus, something characterised by another paradox. I singled out wound without a tear because the way you present the Orthodox singing in the track is very moving to me, as it captures the sublime duality of the island being both miraculous, and heartbreaking — I can say here that clearly this kind of duality plays out throughout the world, but really, san tin kipro, den eshei — the voice is indicative of the struggle of the island, as it can invoke the nationalistic, and fundamentalist aspects of the dominant hegemonic
regime, characterised by a sense of European-but-not, Greek-but-not, Independent-but-not, Orthodox-but-not, and so on. My point is that the ultimate tragedy of the island, its division, is resolutely entangled with the church, and the liturgical order, and so the voice brings these elements into view when heard. On the other hand, the voice is so beautiful, and it makes the opposite case for how beautiful the sound is, and how beautiful the framework through which this sound arises must be in order for us to arrive at this sound. It’s a paradox, a key into the contradictions of the island. It is such a beautiful island, so special, so unfortunate historically, and yet I recall seeing signs at a protest—I think it was an Akamas protest—that read “Cyprus, I love you, but you’ve let me down”. 

          ​MF:
Well, if we follow your line of thinking about World Building, I can ask: can we conceive of music as a sounding environment? Also, how does a listener cope with such an environment? Can we rely on existing definitions of music anymore, or is there need of broadening the conceptual framework to describe the listening behaviour that is common across human listeners?
           Let’s take, for example, the voice as a sounding environment. As I said, I’ve studied polyphonic choral music from a young age, from the Palestrina of the Roman School to Adrian Willaerti Venetian School, and later to Greek women’s “collective/group lamenting” and traditional group singing in the Mediterranean, especially in Italy (in Greco-Italian areas) and Epirus polyphonic songs.  All these different styles are linked with a space and an environment in different contexts and eras, dynamics and socio- politics.
          So, with the vocals of wound without a tear, I wanted to take field recordings from an Orthodox church, a certain kind of choral music which is very characteristic of our Orthodox churches, here in Cyprus, but I really wanted to get a recording of women singing, and it’s not really that common to find here. Unfortunately, it’s a rare thing to find in church, and it’s more or less only the few women monks who do this singing, and by this, I mean that there are only like two or three women’s monastiria. I found a distinct sense of calmness there, however, it was really nice, the dynamic of the commune, how they work, the ecosystem of the monastery. For example, I went to the monastery Agiou Nikolaou in Orounda, and they were so open, they showed me around, there were all these beautiful trees, and they were building a new church building in the back of the site — they had a very noticeable connection with the land.

          PS:
That’s funny, you talk about feeling displaced from home during COVID, and you start to look into that feeling, and next thing you know, you’re at this women’s monastery in Orounda. I can say that there is a huge difference in the realities of Cypriot cities and the villages, and driving on the highway out of town is like a time-machine—every time you drive from Nicosia to Kampia, you go back several decades, you reconnect with a time that has passed. So to end up in Orounda, which is vaguely in that same direction is quite symbolic of going back to the roots. The need to reconnect with home that emerged when you were, as you say, expatriated, lead you to learn even more about where you come from, and may have facilitated a deeper connection to the land of your birth. I think music builds worlds, and so through music you enter worlds, and the music becomes something like a key that leads you deeper and deeper into these worlds. 

          MF:
There is definitely this sense of duality that you mentioned; this is an Eastern Mediterranean island that thinks it’s Greek, because we speak Greek, or at least we speak Cypriot dialect, and that sets up its own duality between native Greek and our dialect. Many contradictions playing out, as you say. I just thought of something for you though: as a kid I was a bit afraid of Hojjas, the sound of the call to prayer that is an inescapably prevalent and iconic part of the reality of living in Nicosia. I remember when I was very young, we went to have dinner at a restaurant in the old city, and I heard Hojjas and I was terrified, it was so intense, and I remember my mother telling me not to worry because “it’s just a sound, it’s just Hojjas”—and I was like “what is Hojjas!?”. Now when I hear it, I always pay attention to the electronic bleeps at the end that occur when the tape is ejected.

          PS:
Right! It’s a really cool trace. This is the thing with voices though, and I have been turning a quotation from Rasheeda Philips over and over in my mind for a while now, where she states: “it is through sound that we create new space-times, the word is the weapon, to destroy the old world, and build a new”. Whether it’s Hojjas, Orthodox choral singing or Rebetiko, these voices aren’t just immersive, they drag places into your mind, those places and those moments in time leap into your world — especially now that I live away from Cyprus, the absence of Hojjas is strange, as if something is missing. 

          MF:
That’s interesting, and yes, I was definitely thinking a lot about time while I was doing this album, and this takes us back to what I was saying before: “what if we use the technology that we have now...” and so on; a traversing of history, or a time-machine. We can definitely think of tracks as time-machines, moving from and through.

          PS:
Now, a slight swerve: in what way does this relate to your Ph.D specifically?

          MF:
Well, yes, I study Philosophy & Theory in Education, a cross-disciplinary Ph.D, of which my thesis focuses on the ‘post-’ in ‘Post-Folk’ music.

          PS:
No way? Okay, then let me change course quickly, because I would like to ask you about that. It’s definitely something I have observed, a rising preoccupation with labelling things folk, but never folk itself, it’s always either “folk-” or “-folk”, like folk-pop or nu-folk, and so on. What do you make of this, and what do you think people are drawn to about (-)folk(-)?

          MF:
It is very interesting! So, now I’m doing my first chapter of the Ph.D which involves the terminology of post-folk, and no one has really written anything academically about post-folk, you know, it’s not written down anywhere as a movement or a genre. The little I have found, some references from Slavic countries, thinks about post-folk more in terms of a re-revival of Folk as it was. So, I’m trying to write the terminology of what is post-folk, and I came across what you mention, this thing about folk as a prefix and as a suffix, and have a list here actually, in my notebook which includes anti-folk, folk-baroque, folk-metal, folk-punk and so on. On the one hand you have the prefix, folk-punk, and on the other, the suffix, indie-folk. Whether the word is used in the beginning or the end seems to give the word a very different meaning, and I’m currently tracking that down. At this moment, I can say that, in general, the term folk carries a sense of the political, and I define folk as being inter-generational; it has a sense of rootedness. So, it is as if people go back to folk during difficult political or social climates—to go back to the roots and develop a new or different kind of complexity.

          PS:
Yes, I wasn’t going to say that Ethnomusicology has an explicit definition of “folk”, but it definitely attributes to folk the important elements of inter-generational transmission, oral culture, but also a sense of “public” that we may be estranged from now. It would be very hard to label music as simply “folk” today, and there is even an implicit contradiction between folk music and capitalism, in terms of who owns the songs and who has the right to sing and record them. It does feel as though we simultaneously recognise the need for this rootedness, but that it is somewhat obscured from us, unobtainable.

          MF:
I can definitely say that oral culture, inter-generationality, and an idea of the commons are important to the movement towards folk, but also collectivity—we found ourselves very disconnected in contemporary days, so it only makes sense that we long for this collectivity. It’s a nice thought, to sit around and sing together like the old days, and that’s the magical thing with folk, the thing that we are so drawn to, that they could just sit at the table during dinner and start singing together or something, or the workers have a bad day at work and they go out to drink and sing or play guitars or something.
          So, you have this sense of collectivity which contrasts today, which is much more singular, and people try to map that collectivity onto what is possible today. Punk and folk are very different things, but they have this collective element that match, so it becomes possible to bring them together in some ways. So, post-folk, to me, is looking at the different kind of musical headspace we are in now, where we can’t so easily just go out to drink and sing—folk-punk musicians don’t necessarily go out and play folk-punk music together after a bad day at work or something, so there are fundamental differences in how we approach music today, and it’s on display in the term post-folk.
          Honestly though, this term post-folk jumped out at me back when I was doing my MA at RCS, and I had Linda Buckley as one of my tutors. She literally came in one day and just said, almost at random, “oh, you’re doing post-folk”, and I was thinking “what is post-folk...? Okay, thanks...?” 
          Yannis Kyriakides also has an interest in post-folk, and I saw him in April and I had mentioned that I am doing this research on post-folk, and he reacted very positively, saying that he knew about this and was also very interested. As a result of this, I am going to go to the Hague in September to work with Yannis on this, and we will be looking at how and where folk and classical met in the middle.

          PS:
Your last work, or rather, the last work I saw from you, may you live in interesting times, was presented and released here in Berlin; we were there, at the aptly named Ausland, and this guy was DJing Greek music before you started, which was surreal in a way, as it transformed the black-box performance space into a kafeneio—my experience of this was actually quite strange, and I will mention it because it relates to all these discussions about displacement and the movement of people and the bringing together of worlds. I hadn’t seen anyone from Cyprus for a while, and suddenly I was sitting in this bar with people who I hadn’t seen since the last time I was on a dance-floor in Cyprus—Chris, Loukas, Stelios and so on, and I had never in my life imagined being in Berlin, outside that bar in the pouring rain having a cigarette with old raver buddies. I really can’t describe how strange it was to experience the two worlds together at the same time, and they absolutely did not come together as a harmonious synthesis, it was dissonant and surreal. It was the ideal situation to think about this particular album. 

          MF:
Well first of all, yes, it was my first time in Berlin, and a few nights before Ausland, I had a performance with my Glaswegian duo, AINO, which is Sonia Killman and I, at Sameheads, which was a completely different context to Ausland. To go from one to the other was obviously quite strange. 
          As for the album itself, it came from an interpretation of post-folk as a kind of post-apocalyptic folk-music, and again I was thinking a lot about my grandmother as a storyteller, and about the element of storytelling in folk music. She came from Varosha (Famagusta), so it was this kind of refugee storytelling, talking about a space that we cannot go because it was a closed city, and when they re-opened Varosha (I haven’t yet been there), I saw pictures of places there and it’s as if I had been there before. I could speak with people who were from Varosha, and, say, for example, “from this road, you can go up there and it leads to this thing, or that place”, and they would say “yeah, how peculiar, it’s as if you have been there yourself”, but it was just because of my grandmother’s storytelling.

          PS:
Ah, there you go, there’s the world building. Your grandmother could take you to that world with stories because worlds are made of words, in a way. It’s a poetic example, too, that your grandmother could take you to a city that was literally closed — I have been there, where the beach ends in a barricade, and looked into the city through the fence, I swam out to sea and looked into this “ghost city”. It makes storytelling sound like astral travelling. Those stories placed you in the world.

          MF:
Yeah, that’s true, and just now I realise that maybe one reason I haven’t found myself going there, to Famagusta, even though it is partly reopened, is because it could detract from my grandmother’s storytelling, to see it up close, in that condition. Although, I have been to that beach you mentioned, Titsiroi or Pezounospilioi in Kapparis, and I went there specifically because, yes, there is a point on that enclave where you can swim out to sea and look back and see right into Varosha, so I have observed it from a distance, from the position of the ocean.

          PS:
Yeah, it is a spectacular image, for you to observe this city, from a distance, mediated by water, and the reflections in the water. It’s really something. To be honest, I have written here somewhere to ask you about water, and a lot of the imagery we have currently to accompany this article is themed around water and the ocean, so now that we find ourselves swimming out to sea, looking into Varosha, what is the connection with Mystiki Fleva and water—or am I imagining it?

          MF:
Water is an important theme, definitely, especially when thinking about Rebetiko as the music of people who moved, who moved by water, so to think about water as a body that both moves and moves people, and therefore water also moves contexts and stories, it brings worlds together as you might say. When I was a kid, I was also very afraid of the sea. I was going to the beach, of course, but I was afraid of the rocks, the sea, and what was in it, and so on. I didn’t fully start to connect with the waters until more recently, maybe the last three summers, because of Stelios (other half of Ichomagnetic Thoughts and my partner). We were going to the beach after our meetings for Ichomagnetic Thoughts, and having someone who was safe to be with in the sea, almost like the local person showing me around, explaining what kind of things you can and can’t do in certain places. 

          PS:
Oh God, that is really touching—but it also reminds me: you did a performance recently called Skin of Water — we saw some pictures from Sessions, and heard a related recording on your guest show on Alysidez, on Barking Cats Radio. Let’s wrap up by touching on the Skin of Water, and what is coming next for Mystiki Fleva. 

          MF:
Skin of Water was a site-specific installation by artists Orestis Telemachou, Khaled Khalifa, and artist-curator Nicola Mitropoulou, as well as an experiential, drone, ambient site-specific performance as part of Ichomagnetic Thoughts’ 22 degrees Halo. This recording started as a conversation between me and Nicola, talking about water and reflections. At the time I was rethinking about my relationship with water and the sea. As I said before, as a kid, I loved being on the beach, but always scared of going in the water, which led me to spend more time in the mountains, hiking, than swimming in the sea. Of course, locality and accessibility do play an important role, and being of Nicosia, which is very near to the furthest point from the coastline (a village aptly named Politiko), felt more natural to be near the mountains and the forest rather than the water. Whereas friends that come from cities near the coast have a different understanding or relationship with the water. The people who I made 22 degrees Halo with, Stelios and Nicola, in particular, come from coastal cities, and we were interested in the differences between how we understand water, and the reflections in the water, and so on. 
          Next for ΜΦ, I think, is a site-specific performance at Xydadiko, in Limassol, in October which is part of Liquid Hot Mess, a project between myself, Nicola Mitropoulou, Clara Zinecker, as part of a residency with the Mitos Foundation.

          PS:

Maybe it’s not my place to say, but I can imagine a Mystiki Fleva’s performance or album that involves using Famagusta as a way of staging your ideas — how possible it would be logistically, is another thing, it’s in the North side of Cyprus after all. 

          MF:
Well, maybe, I don’t know. It’s definitely post-Famagusta now, it’s not the Famagusta of my grandparents and so on.

          PS:
It’s even a post-post-Famagusta, because you have the idea of Famagusta, this booming, beautiful place on the Northern coast, then it becomes abandoned, post- , and now it’s in this bizarre state.

          MF:
Yes, it’s open in a very surreal way, because they’ve done it in this kind of underground/dark tourism way, a kind of theme park, so it’s as you say, it’s something completely different—it’s meta-meta.

Mentioned Artists & Works:
ecati
Gadjo Dilo
Imam Bailti
Kostis Bezos
Manolis Chiotis
Markos Vamvakaris
Mary Linda
Vasilis Tsitsanis
Yannis Kyriakides
Giorgos Katsaros - Kai giati den mas to les