Markos Vamvakaris

Death Is Bitter (Limited Edition) (850024931510)

Reduced price! Death Is Better (Limited Edition) View larger

Death Is Bitter (Limited Edition)

Markos Vamvakaris

Mississippi Records

850024931510

LPS 170336

850024931510

FOLK

1

LP 20,99 €

-30%

29,98 €

180 GRAM MONO EDITION

Hailing form the island of Syros in the Aegean, some 100 miles from Athens, at the interzone of Europe and Asia Minor, Vamvakaris travelled to Athens as a 12 year old fleeing the police on a false tip-off. He ended up working various jobs in and around the port of Pireus (stevedore, shoe-polisher, paperboy, butcher etc.) and picked up the bouzouki with the claim that he would learn to play it within six months or chop his hand off with a cleaver.

This fortuitous event led to him becoming an innovative virtuoso of the instrument, writing his own deadly simple but effective songs that were popular in the tekés, clandestine bars for hash-smoking and the like, and he was cutting his first records by 1932 and regularly playing the city’s ruder establishments.

‘Death is Bitter’ is drawn from his work 1932-36, and spans 12 rarely heard songs about drugs, love (lust), and life in the Greek working classes that could be compared to an early form of Greek folk as rap, with songs stripped to the bone and dealing in life’s more immediate matters. The simple but deadly tight rhythms also reflect Márkos’ background as a champion zebekiko dancer, and it’s not hard to hear how they would have brought red-eyed port workers and seductresses of the night to their feet for a bop in low-lit taverns.

TRACKS:

  • SIDE A
  • A1. We Were Smoking One Evening
  • A2. Hash-Smoking Mortissa
  • A3. Bitch, You Made Me Waste Away
  • A4. The Spinne
  • A5. Arap Zebekiko
  • A6. The Butcher
  • SIDE B
  • B1. Serfo Taxim
  • B2. Your Arabian Eyes
  • B3. My Woman's Jealous
  • B4. In The Dark Last Night
  • B5. Markos From Syros
  • B6. Pireotikos Manes (Death Is Bitter)