(Irida 028)
ĒCHOS is Eleni Bratsou’s debut album. As an artist with a dual identity, a singer specializing in ancient music and at the same time an ethnomusicologist with specializing in the field of Mediterranean musical traditions, Eleni Bratsou has developed her personal vocal idiom by interpreting the music she chooses with sensitivity and diligence.
On this, her debut album, she presents an anthology of songs that come from the depths of time, outlining a journey where the cultures of Greece, Cyprus, Castile, Jewish Spain, Provence and Armenia meet.
The repertoire pays tribute to the eponymous and anonymous bard through narrative folk songs, Sephardic and Armenian Romanzas, Greek traditional songs and the secular and art music of the Middle Ages.
The title ĒCHOS refers to the sensory meaning but also to the meaning of the primal, archaic sound as well as to the name of the medieval musical scale. The musical and interpretive approach by Eleni Bratsou and the exceptional musicians that accompany it highlights a common musical language of the seemingly different songs that have been selected: Songs that are treated as narratives that follow and complement each other, creating an asthetic result which is at once crystalline and dreamlike, sometimes fragile and sometimes pirecing, which outlines a poetry of the universality of love.