This much acclaimed Cyprus-based trio return with a thrilling fourth album. The record pushes their trademark Mediterranean sonics into a deep psychedelic and avant-folk direction. A danceable fever storm of stringed instruments, multi-layered singing and trombone-driven low end.
Night is when strange things happen. When shapes shift and blur. When it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s illusion. Night…is the time of the imagination. For Cyprus’s Monsieur Doumani, those hours of blackness have lured them in a very different direction for their fourth album, Pissourin.
Since their beginning in 2011, the trio have been globally-lauded for their innovative, highly-charged acoustic reinventions of the Cypriot tradition. They have won numerous awards, ranging from Songlines “Best Group” (UK/2019) to the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (Germany/2018) and the Andrea Parodi Critics Award (Italy/2018). Yet after three albums they’d grown restless, searching for something new. A challenge, a fresh resonance that illustrated the people they’d become.
Something unexpected.
The timing was certainly right. After eight years, founding member Angelos Ionas had decided to leave the band. To replace him, Andys Skordis, who was already a touring guitarist with the group, joined full-time and began to contribute his own ideas.
They were ready to embark on a very different journey.
“Our idea was a concept, an album that was a portrait of the night,”/ says band leader and founding member Antonis Antoniou, who plays the bouzouki-like tzouras, and along with trombonist Demetris Yiasemides makes up the trio. “Something that began in the place between sleep and dream and waking. It gave us the concept, a quest through the night for the meaning of life, to feel things we did when we were kids: innocent, true, honest. A chan....... more