ATHENS DAY 7

The smell of oranges came from the stands below our bal­cony. Fil­ing out of the house, we wad­ed through the veg­eta­bles and fish and made our way to Vik­to­ria Plaza. We met all as musi­cians and soon began to play.

We rehearsed the song we would be record­ing in the after­noon; Amali, the lyri­cal melody cre­at­ed by friends that stand togeth­er. Passers­by soon stopped to lis­ten. Sev­er­al fam­i­lies with chil­dren came near, most­ly fathers out killing time with their kids. It was beau­ti­ful to see the chil­dren so curi­ous. Smil­ing, they chased the pigeons around us in the park.

We had the assis­tance of Chris­tos Sakel­lar­i­ou and Pano­gi­o­tis Kyr­i­ak­ou, two very gen­er­ous sound engi­neers who vol­un­teered their time and expertise.

We made many valu­able con­nec­tions that we would keep for a long time.

We made our way to Matrix Stu­dios that we were intro­duced to through MusicaRa­ma, to begin our first record­ings for Ameli.

He prac­ticed with Ali, to make sure that the tune of the Oud accu­rate­ly adhered to the melody of the voice. They both seemed a bit anx­ious, it was Ali’s first time work­ing in a music stu­dio, and Husein had such a mes­sage to con­vey through this record­ing. Husein went to record first. They closed him into the booth, and Damien and a pro­fes­sion­al vocal coach, Lydia Theochari, were there to aid him.

Lydia showed him how to relax his face, to rest his pos­ture so that his voice could flow freely from his core. It took him more than an hour to get a take that sat­is­fied him. In the mean­time, new songs were being worked out. Ali kept prac­tic­ing, and Shayan showed us his new riffs and talked about the way he devel­oped songs on guitar.

He called the halts and stops between chords ​“bro­ken space”, an evoca­tive phrase. Ali took his turn and quick­ly fin­ished his take. We spilled out into the street feel­ing sat­is­fied and secure in our first record­ing. When asked how he felt about the expe­ri­ence, Husein called it ​“the best day of his life.”