STYLIANOS OU is the latest reincarnation of Greek writer, visual and sound artist Stelios Papagrigoriou. He is one of the founders of the art group Hand & Leg, with whom he has been performing in Europe, Israel and New York. In 2021, he was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS, and his novels and short stories have been published by Nefeli and Topos press. Reflecting a close relationship between his artistic practice and sound forms, his paintings and sculptures have been featured on the covers of his albums released by the labels Slovenly, Fourth Dimension and Agios Anthropos, and his installations and costumes have been used for his performances in Greece and abroad.

Stelios describes his main interest as being "the theme of the human form, as well as the deformations which the latter may suffer". This double focus on body and its destruction, dance and its decadence, is immediately clear when listening to TO QFAHLOGO, his latest EP on SØVN Records. Featuring five pieces involving a heavy reliance on modular synthesis and vocals. The grid is respected with unflinching obstination to a Sufi dance-like effect: being transported to a middle ground between flesh and its dismembered cells, through unstoppable rhythms.

"From the beginning it was all about disintegration. Dissolvement of the senses and mostly hearing. Hearing loss is the main theme of the album that begins from the absence of sound to end at various minor complications of the human body. The sounds are mostly part of the worldview of a hypochondriac. The electronic cacophony is always present in this work, nourished in concrete waves of pitched vocals and modular arpeggios.

The story behind the tracks though denies darkness as a colour. Instead, complex synthesized electronics ring from beneath the arrhythmic sequences, before stifling everything in a heavy fuzz of dense but delicate harmonies.

The titles of the tracks represent the form of a certain ''ghost'' disease that haunts the body/mind of the composer. The composer is absent while at the same time interprets itself through the psychosomatic filters of his PTSD and other psychological disorders. This sound work is the result of a whole year of studio time in which the message delivered may as well be this:

Everything, even our appetite for composition, lies in the realm of an inevitable
extinction. Under this alien light, the composer enjoys an instant, ephemeral freedom."

''Το Κουφάλογο'' (To qfahlogo) in Greek means literally ''the deaf horse'' and it's used in a humoristic manner to describe someone who is totally deaf. The title of the album follows the feeling of sound dissolvement and it's been translated verbally with a slight ironic greeklish wordplay
credits
released February 3, 2023