A 1-hour radio special by the Syrian & Greek Youth Forum

‘Asyrmatos’ is a radio special by the Syrian & Greek Youth Forum. Taking its name from the old neighborhood of Athens – Ασύρματος, literally meaning ‘wireless’ or ‘radio’ – the program sounds out layers of history and Mediterranean relations. Asyrmatos is one of the 1922 settlements of Athens, a place made out of displacement. The neighborhood called radio is our jumping off point, from which we move across cities, seas, dreams, and futures. The program is a sonic choreography of Athens and its relations to the sea: a sound-cycle, an intercity symphony, a feedback loop. Athens is both transmitter and receiver. We turn the city into a sea and the sea into a radio.

The program is part of SEAWARDS events organized by Syrian & Greek Youth Forum in collaboration with Onassis Stegi within the framework of the project Ulysses, co-funded by the European Union. It is part of an Athens-based response to the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses – specifically to the first chapter, ‘Telemachus’, and its themes of youth, belonging, cities and seas. We think this 1922 publication through events in Athens and the Aegean in the same year, as well as new cultural forms of the city symphony that were circulating at the time, in an effort to write cities (as Joyce did) through memory and sound. The result is a set of sonic geographies and imaginations that bring past and future together.

This show was produced for Movement Radio, and was first broadcast on Sunday 30 April 2023. https://movement.radio/show/asyrmatos-mediterradio-2023-04-30

https://www.onassis.org/onassis-stegi/networks/ulysses-a-european-odyssey

TRACKLIST

• NIKOS SKALKOTTAS (COMPOSER) / LORENDA RAMOU (PIANO) Island Images
• THE SYRIAN AND GREEK YOUTH FORUM Mediterradio (Alexandria – Nablus – Damascus – Athens)
• TOM WESTERN Aegean Theory (A Sea Poem)*
• NIKOS SKALKOTTAS (COMPOSER) / ICELAND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA (PERFORMER) The Sea
• MIKIS THEODORAKIS Aniliaga Stena
• THANOS MIKROUTSIKOS (TOM WESTERN SYNTH MESS) Esmeralda
• KAREEM ALKABBANI & BECKA WOLFE Haddi Ya Bahr Haddi
• ELENI KARAINDROU (COMPOSER) / CAMERATA ORCHESTRA (PERFORMER) Farewell Theme
• HAILU MERGIA Yefikir Engurguro
  
  * ‘Aegean Theory (A Sea Poem)’ from the tracklist contains references to the article ‘Seaward: The Sound of Eros and an Athenian Avenue to the Aegean’ by Phoebe Giannisi, the essay ‘The Greek Archipelago – A Far-Flung City’ by Spyros Asdrahas, and the book Sea and Fog by Etel Adnan.