Aza

Aza is the performing and recording name of Greek experimental, sound artist Constantinos Lamprou, who was born in Athens in 1979. Aza’s sound lives up to the noise tradition of sparse, minimalist, sample-based electronica, with affection for unusual frequencies. Working more as a collector of sonic instances rather than as a musician, Aza filters the everyday life to discover the essence of our auditory experience. His syntheses intermit an assemblage of ordinary sounds in a variety of “raw” states with frequencies at the edges of human hearing and melodic instrumental interferences. Seemingly emerging from the subconscious, his sound is never self-referential. Contrariwise, Aza’s abstractive repercussion entails the construction of a complex soundscape that draws the audience in to a pure auditory vacuum, characterized by a pervasive undercurrent psychosomatic experience.

As a reformist experimental artist, Aza does not side entirely with either traditional structures of music or with radical postmodern experimental structures. While both elements are to be found interchangeably in play within his work, they are drawn as tools for broadening the narrative capacity of his sound, not as a criterion of form. Aza does not concern himself with the melody embedded in music but with the non-melody, which appears to be lacking from music. This absence of “non-melody” emerges mutually in both opposing strains of musical structures and eventually turns the subject of debate into a disagreement on form. For Aza however, form is impulsive and of secondary importance to the overall creative production. His entry in the debate on sonic semiology, a mere part of a larger and older debate on aesthetics; Aza repeatedly demonstrates through his work how the binary distinctions between function and form, sound and noise, harmony and ataxia are inadequate to justify the prevalence of a new kind of beauty alien to previous times. By investigating the inherit beauty that is to be found within non-melody, whether non-melody belongs to music or to noise, it becomes clear how large a part ‘absence’ plays in the conceptualization of his work.

Throughout his sonorous investigations, Aza distorts the phenomenon in search for the phenomenal and what comes out, sometimes as a composition and sometimes as an intermission, is a new space for the audience’s objective existence and subjective experience. In his own words, Aza defines his sound as that which stands “between you and the speaker”. He is involved in the evanescent gap that occurs in-between the transmitter and the recipient and attempts to broaden that intermediate space in which everything is still in a state of flux, where nothing is either concrete nor fluid, and this includes our very own existence and experience, our objective and subjective selves.