Nick Tsiavos’ work shouldn’t be heard on the radio or Youtube or through some generic MP3 delivery system, because your ears won’t hear what he is truly capable of.
We are bombarded with so much tinny garbage from the music industry these days that it’s hard to remember what good music actually sounds like. Attending the launch of Tsiavos’ latest album Liminal at the Melbourne Recital Centre was a salutary reminder that there is still good quality out there, as well as artists who still uphold its charter.
Now you can fiddle your brain with the ironies of how relevant popular culture is or how amazing our global economy has access to anything the heart desires. Or you can engage in the good stuff and Tsiavos and his cohorts, Deborah Kayser (vocals) Adam Simmons (wind) Peter Neville (percussion) and Eugene Ughetti (percussion) are the team to show you how.
Because quite frankly, this listener and watcher is getting sick of being fed garbage and being told that it’s ok. This is not a backward leap to conservatism, by no means – it’s a stand up protest demanding that high quality must come back into our lives, universally, and that includes the clothes on our backs and the shoes on our feet.
Liminal is a testimony of 20 years of hard work fusing Jazz, modern and classical with ancient spiritual chants. It achieves what all good music does well by conjuring up a multitude for both the mind and the heart.
There is a journeyman ambience to each track in Liminal, filled with as many characters as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, realised either singularly through each instrument featured or as an ensemble. What was most impressive is Tsiavos’ ability to implode musical structures, let you hover in it, and then be slapped with an elegant dissonance and be catapulted in another direction.
There is also a remarkable mastery in the tapering off of each track to its own unique conclusion, telling us that the echoes of music within a well-managed silence should be valued above everything else.
LIMINAL is available at most local music stores and online.