Particularly interesting was the process of making the music video, featuring the musicians, joined by Marifenia singing second voice (together with Vasilis who also sings along), and Panos Karagiorgos who is no musician but wrote the lyrics for the song – he can be seen in the video as the man who, for reasons only known to himself, decides to go buy a knife, then doesn’t have the guts to see his plan through until the end. The video was unscripted, starting with some footage we had anyway recorded at the studio while recording, and some footage of everyone playing along with the recording at the ‘Kioski’ bar near the lake of Arta, then augmented with some unprepared shots of Panos and Theodoros playing customer and shopkeeper in a local store.

In July we also finished the last track with Mahala for their as of yet unscheduled release ‘Batirdi’. They were at the time racing all over Greece, doing many shows in bars, clubs, and festivals. We had the pleasure to hear them a few times live, and they clearly got tighter and more energetic with every show they did. Their last track can be heard here:

A totally new project we started during the summer is with Lyra player Aspa Anogiati, who originates from Preveza, a little under an hour from our town, and who has been living in Berlin for the past years where she has her own music school. For the first track we recorded, she brought her friend Giannis Sopikiotis from Preveza whom we had heard sing in the past, and we happened to have both Elias Filos around as well as Yiannis Mitsios the jazz guitar player. So it became a bit of a musical party, having even Marifenia join on her Laouto and with backing vocals and Michiel on the banjo bass.

From France-based singer Kalliroi Raouzeou we got the request to make a video montage with some footage a friend had shot from her for a new song, which she had already recorded in a studio in Athens together with Urban Modal’s Dimosthenis Karachristodoulou on lyra and lafta.

With Lafta player and singer Nikos Andrikos we had started winter 2024 – 2025 to record his 10 etudes for Lafta which he composed as part of his postdoc on the Lafta. These pieces have an educational purpose, each exploring possibilities of specific techniques and tonal modes. We recorded instructional takes which are accompanied with the score in videos, as well as slower versions with video where Nikos demonstrates first the whole etude, and then even slower certain tricky sections. This will probably be published later this year or early next year.

Also, from spring 2025, rock band ‘Alles Meres’ featuring Michalis Varkas, Misel Ef and singer Konstantina Kapsali had come a few times to record vocals for their self produced tracks. The last track they had recorded, they decided to give to us to see what we could do in the mix to improve the total sound.

And finally, last but not least, Yiannis Mitsios’ album we mixed and mastered was released on Honolulu Records in Holland. The album got very good feedback from various directions, not only for the excellent performances of the musicians, but also for the artistic vision and sound quality. We have to say that apart of Epirus Music Lab doing everything possible to make it sound great, Yiannis and his band got lucky to get recorded by sound engineer Giorgos Dekas in the brand new studio at the Sonology department in Den Haag, Holland. So we started out with excellent sounding recordings – which is no guarantee but for sure a good starting point.