Review: Savvas Metaxas – For How Read Now
Two eggs for breakfast precede the skitter of the unexpected.
RELEASED ON FLAMING PINES.
Often it's the mornings when we have the most agency. We choose what we have for breakfast (in this case, we hear Metaxas boiling two eggs), then we decide to take a trip to the park (as captured in field recordings during the opening minutes). The day has yet to impress its urgencies and accidents upon us. Everything happens on time. This 25-minute piece tracks the transition from the clean execution of our morning plans to the uncertainty of the afternoon. Perhaps we get a phone call that stops us in our tracks for half-hour, or leave our wallet at home and have to circle back. Field recordings scuttle across eachother or slip into reverse; the commotion of infinite causational variables? Or the clicks and snaps of our priorities recalibrating around a new challenge? We’re steeped in a skittering energy, ears constantly darting away from the point of focus (birdsong, clunking wood), and out to the unexpected visitor on the peripheries (whining hinges? The hiss of poured sand?).
Of course, the key is to roll with it. Accept the hand as dealt. The title originates from a misprint in a book by Zygmunt Bauman titled “Modernity And Its Ambivalence”, which led Metaxas to reflect on how mistakes can completely overhaul a given meaning. This piece could be seen as relinquishing any attachment to the definitive “thing”, with recordings that forever bearing the handprints of post-meddling – tapes in reverse, clattering objects slumped into lower fidelities. Every sound is inseparable from its subjective treatment. Rather than seeking the solidity of a central truth, or clinging to our daily schedule, this frenetic yet meticulous piece turns intention into a fluid and reactive force, accepting happenstance and working with it. Mistakes and deviations don't sabotage our aims; they merely invite us to reshape them.
