Nearfield by Spyros Polychronopoulos + Yorgos Dimitriadis

From Spyros...
Yorgos and I met in Athens in 2016, during the Deteriorate Sound Festival — a short-lived but potent attempt to bridge the experimental and improvised scenes of Berlin and Athens. Yorgos had already been living in Berlin for a decade by then, and I was based in London at the time. We didn’t perform together, but hearing each other's solo sets planted a quiet seed. The idea of a collaboration lingered — slowly fermenting in the background as our paths continued to evolve independently.

Almost ten years later, we finally found ourselves in the same room, in front of microphones and speakers, with no particular plan — only an unspoken sense of shared listening. What followed was a series of focused, near-ritual sessions. We weren’t trying to build something grand or expansive. If anything, we were peeling layers away — trying to listen more closely, to stay with the material, to inhabit a space together. It felt like we were carving sound from within a room rather than composing it. Not "adding", but revealing what was already there.

After those sessions, I spent much of the winter traveling, carrying the recordings with me — on airports, in quiet rooms, across different cities. Most of the compositional work happened there, in motion, and always through headphones. That kind of proximity shaped everything — the way details surfaced, how textures folded into each other, the sense that sound was not surrounding me, but arriving from within. That’s how Nearfield found its name: not from a technical description, but from the experience of listening up close, almost inside the sound.

The album moves between abstraction and precision. Fragmented field recordings, resonant drones, unstable electronics, and Yorgos’ percussive gestures unfold slowly, never quite settling. At times, it feels like an abandoned space still echoing with activity — like machines continuing to hum long after the lights have gone out. It's not music that fills silence, but music that lets the space resonate. Not ambient, not narrative — but attuned to the small shifts and tensions that exist in the in-between.

Room40, a beacon of sound...ringing out from the deepest south. Also home to our sibling labels Someone Good and A Guide To Saints.

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