Death Is Bitter

Description

Rebetika is the sound of Greece and Asia Minor meeting against the backdrop of civil war, massive population movements, and the anarchy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Poetic, sad, and bitter, rebetika music was born in the hashish dens of Mediterranean ports, its verses whispered in Greek prisons before spreading to the general public in the 1930s, largely propelled by a series of remarkable recordings by Markos Vamvakaris. Markos, as he is still called today, sang songs of love, pain, and desire in brothels, bars, and the smoking dens of the port of Piraeus. Arriving in 1917, he worked as a skinner in a tannery. When he began playing the bouzouki around 1924, he had absorbed this life, at the very bottom of the Greek social ladder. These workers lived by their own code and in total opposition to the rest of the population, and rebetika was their music. On these first twelve tracks, recorded in Athens between 1932 and 1936, Markos is already a master of the bouzouki. His powerful and clean playing complements his raspy voice and remarkable rhythmic sensitivity. The pieces build in a spiral, his drones of open notes and melodic lines eliciting cries of ecstasy and encouragement from his fellow musicians. These recordings, incredibly rare and remastered by experts, mark the peak of rebetika, the brief period between the emergence of the genre in the early 1930s and the government censorship of lyrics starting in 1936. During the Occupation, there were no rebetika recordings, and although Markos had some successes in the post-war years, he never reached that level again. These are the most breathtaking, enchanting, and intense works of one of the great artists of the 20th century. Pressed on 160g vinyl, it comes with an 8-page booklet featuring historical notes, rare photos, and the translation of the lyrics.