Imam Baildi

This is a great album, with a great idea behind it: take recordings of Greek popular songs of the 40s and 50s then sample and remix them, adding live instruments, to produce an upbeat and inventive representation of the tracks. Imam Baildi, an Athens-based ensemble, cite influences from Dizzy Gillespie to Depeche Mode to Dr Dre, making for an interesting mix of sounds. The album opens to sampled vocals from Sofia Vembo (a Greek wartime musical heroine) that morph into an ambient-electro section. This is followed by what feels like a very long lead-out, but the potential for boredom is dispelled with the great Balkan-style opening of the second track, with trumpet and clarinet and then a funky bouzouki passage. ‘O Paratempos’ puts an amusing dub beat behind the singing of Manolis Hiotis, coupled with the raw vocals of rebetika singer Ioanna Georgakopoulou and the collective singing and bouzouki of the classic ‘To Minope Tis Avgis’ is again given a quirky modern setting that, perhaps surprisingly, works very well. A creepy Nymanesque scoring is used for Vassilis Tsitsanis’s ‘Ta Xena Heria’ and it is followed with the classic rebetika vocals of Stelios Keromytis and Ioanna Georgakopoulou. A more radical treatment is given to ‘Poso Lypami, with a clever start¬stop pattern underlying the singing of Sofia Vembo.

The least successful elements of the album are the original tracks. But all in all it’s a must-buy for fans of Greek popular song who want to hear their musical heroes in a new setting.