Marina Satti: Eurovision bound

It’s summer 2017. Marina Satti’s second single ‘Mantissa’ has become a radio hit in Greece and Bulgaria. Kelly Fanarioti of HuffPost is interviewing Marina in her birth town of Athens, where the track’s already viral video was made. Fanarioti parrots the frequent request from Satti’s fanbase that she appear on Eurovision: “For me, it is still the beginning of my career,” she replies, “Of course, it can be done in the future only if I had the right team and we had something great to suggest.” Fast forward to autumn 2023 and Greece’s national broadcasting corporation ERT has decided to nominate Satti to perform at the forthcoming contest without any national competition held. Why is that not a surprise?

First: Marina’s music. It’s undoubtedly modern, but also based on a mix of regional traditions. Polyphonic singing from the Epirus region of north-west Greece, rural shawm (zurna)-adorned music of the Greece-Macedonia-Bulgaria-Turkey borderlands, influences from Crete (the island where she grew up) and rebetiko, the genre that blossomed following the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey when displaced people – among them Marina’s grandfather – joined poor urban populations in large Greek cities like Athens, Thessaloniki and Heraklion. During her live shows, Satti sings both Bulgarian polyphonic songs and songs in Arabic. With a Sudanese father and a Greek mother, Marina is the embodiment of the cultural exchange between Greece and the ‘East’.

Satti’s debut album YENNA (Birth), released in 2022, embraces postmodern Hellenism with a twist and delivers a wide range of musical ideas and emotions. One of the singles, ‘Yiati Pouli M’’ (Why, My Bird), is Satti’s take on the traditional Greek song, where she embraces different vocal harmonies to create a gloomy atmosphere perfectly suited for a song lamenting a bird with broken wings that can’t sing like it used to. The video for this one was made in Istanbul and contains clashes of everyday life, whirling dervishes and an intriguing image of a group of local women, with Marina in the centre, and the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque, a symbol of the city’s Byzantine and Ottoman heritage, in the background. And that’s just for starters, on the album there’s punchy rap ‘Spirto Ke Venzini’ (Match and Gasoline), R&B-driven ‘Pali’ (Again) and ‘Kritiko’ with an impressive drill soundscape, that in concert Satti turns into a folk pageant dance with traditional flute. After the release of YENNA, Satti performed more than 40 shows all around Europe.

Satti’s second speciality is her education and experience. Even before graduating from the Berklee College of Music in 2011, she had performed with Bobby McFerrin and become a graduate of advanced classical studies and jazz at the Athens Nakas Conservatory. In 2016 she founded Fonés (Voices), ‘a female a capella group performing traditional polyphonic songs.’ She continued along this line when, in November 2023, she was the main voice in a performance for voice and orchestra by Kostas Giannidis at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall. Another story is her acting career, with performances in leading theatres and on Greek TV. Satti’s higher education started at the National Technical University of Athens where she studied architecture, a subject she no doubt used to build her music career.

The final reason for her Eurovision nomination: Satti’s image (exploring not only her heritage and the Greek ethos but also paradoxes of Western vs Balkan, philosophical yet wild), the tension between a humble attitude and the popstar status she has achieved. How often do you see a folk singer endorsing top brands, as she’s regularly doing on Instagram? The title of Satti’s Eurovision entry, ‘ZARI’, translates to ‘Dice’ and explores fate and luck. The Eurovision community should consider themselves quite lucky to finally meet her on May 7 in Malmö, Sweden.

This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Songlines today