Released a few days before April, Galop was undoubtedly the reissue that threw the longest shadow over the month, and about time too. Lena Platonos’s contribution to electronic music has been acknowledged by the Greek underground for a long time, so it’s good for us all to finally bite into it, above and beyond the hit “Bloody Shadows From Afar”. Platonos has a true sense of pop and a strong experimental instinct, her finger absolutely on the pulse of her time.
The album oscillates effortlessly between dark, pulsating analogue landscapes and tense storytelling, as she crafts a world which is knowing, smart and ironic, and also very warm. Rigid drum patterns, metallic vocoders, frozen basslines and crazed synths are led imperiously by Platonos’s languid voice, which seems to come from a time suspended between the never and the now. To listen to Galop is to enter a world of slow pulses, phone bleeps, threatening supernovas, and language taking pleasure in itself.
Made by Platonos single-handedly in 1985, Galop was described by its maker as “a study in the mythology of urban population of the contemporary metropolis and also a gaze into the future life of it.” An extremely accomplished study no less, which deserves attention, and this elegant record is essential to the story of Mediterranean post-modernity.
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