On Spiral, the kanun player, composer and improviser Sofia Labropoulou continues the path opened by her first solo album, Sisyphus (Odradek Records, 2020), deepening her long-term exploration of the kanun beyond its established techniques and vocabulary. The album is framed by lines from Dante’s Purgatorio, reimagined in the first person as in Dionysios Solomos’ opening to the Hymn to Liberty, and unfolds as a passage that circles rather than moves forward.
Across seven tracks, Hildegard von Bingen’s O Virtus Sapientiae and György Kurtág’s Un brin de bruyère à Witold, from Játékok, in memory of Witold Lutosławski, sit among pieces drawn from poetry, philosophy and political thought. Days of Idleness VIII is a musical translation of a sonnet by Dionysis Kapsalis; Détournements I & II set An Intimate Discussion with Guy Debord beside No Beauty Without Freedom, a counter-appropriation of the Greek folk song Dance of Zalongo; Untuned Ears Hear Nothing But Discord imagines an encounter between Emma Goldman and Iannis Xenakis. The album opens with Chasm and closes with Geçiş (Passage) and Exodus, with a modular synthesizer joining the kanun in Exodus.
