Microcosmos: Jan Van & Fotis Siotas | Folks Nowadays

Boasting a wide range of music applications and artistic interests, two prolific musicians are coming together to define a “space” they call Folks Nowadays: the title of their latest album. The references to folk music, as traditional or popular music, are obvious, but what is even more interesting are the paths, and the convergence, of these two outstanding music folks within the diversity of their lives and art.

Drummer and composer Jannis Angelopoulos (better known as Jan Van), who stems from the broader genre of contemporary jazz and world music, has released a number of notable albums (Misspent, Ladókolla, Jan Van, Poem, Streams) and boasts several significant artistic collaborations and compositions for the theater, never fails to reveal a different aspect of his artistic self with each new work. Similarly, Fotis Siotas, with his amazing violin, has been distinguished for many years through his collaborations with artists such as Thanasis Papakonstantinou, Sokratis Malamas, Dionysis Savvopoulos, Alkinoos Ioannidis, Giannis Aggelakas and Foivos Delivorias, among others.  Nevertheless, his personal compositional activity (Ta Deftera [The Second Ones] and Dyo Lathoi [Two Mistakes], on lyrics by Thodoris Gonis) is what renders him a “force to be reckoned with” in modern Greek songwriting.

The collaboration of the two artists on the albums Streams and Two Mistakes, as well as on the composition of the music score for Evi Theodorou's theatrical play Rizes apo vamvaki [Roots of Cotton] for the Athens & Epidaurus Festival (2022), paved the way for Folks Nowadays, which proves to be one of the top albums of the year, as it combines sounds and rhythms of traditional music (Macedonian and Cretan, Balkan and Indian, etc.) with the dynamics of violin and percussion, while at the same time evading all restrictive idiomatic contexts and acquiring the creative identity of each musician, here functioning as a binary unit. The end result is an amazing music that gradually leads you to a real celebration of the senses, combining past, present and future, the known and the familiar with the unexpected.