Music

Corinthian evangelizes "ass-pounding techno"

by Josiah Hughes

Evangelos Lambrinoudis II is one of the most unique personalities working in Canadian electronic music. Aside from the fact that his name is, well, Evangelos Lambrinoudis II, there’s so much more to the man than a passing knowledge of Ableton and a fire Soundcloud page.

Lambrinoudis is an artist who constantly strives to challenge himself and others. He nerds out about gear, references black metal, and runs the most popular hip-hop night in Calgary. In conversation, he’s as quick to crack crass, expletive-laden jokes as he is to drop knowledge on Marxism, high art, and film.

Though best known as one half of the ambient post-dubstep duo Sanctums (who just broke a year-long hiatus to complete writing for their second album), he’s more recently been working solo as Corinthian. As he likes to call it, the music he now makes is “ass-pounding techno.”

“Dan [Solo, of Sanctums] moved to Victoria and I still wanted to make music,” the artist recalls. “I was listening to a lot of techno, and I was pretty bored with a lot of the R&B shit in Calgary. I just decided to do something a little bit different for me and started doing the techno thing.”

To challenge himself further, Lambrinoudis opted to perform his Corinthian tracks with all hardware, using synthesizers and samplers in place of laptop clicking. “With Sanctums I was always talking about how frustrated I was with our live performance,” he says. “We were really trapped because we made the music in the box with the computer, and that forced us to play the music live in a way that was using loops and using Ableton. It wasn’t really gratifying.”

“I think a good performance is when you are risking everything,” he continues. “If you fucking play a wrong chord or say something stupid, you can fuck it up. That’s a good performance.”

An obsession with machines has made its way into other aspects of Lambrinoudis’ discipline. He recently launched a new label called Deep Sea Mining Syndicate, a cassette and digital imprint with which he plans to release music from himself and other likeminded performers. And while there’s certainly an artistry to everything he’s doing, he says he thinks of himself as more of a worker than an auteur.

“I’m tired of this notion of being an artist,” he said. “That’s over to me. That’s why I choose to use the machines, because the machines are making the music…. I feel like there’s something really functional about the music that I want to put out on this label.”

Lambrinoudis recently debuted “Trueno,” an outtake from his first Corinthian EP for the label. A terse six-minute banger, it’s a more straight-ahead techno track than the other music from the EP, which he describes as “long form, more noise, kind of ass-poundy ambient stuff.”

Ultimately, it all boils down to a desire to stir the pot and change things up in Calgary, where Lambrinoudis feels the electronic music scene has become stagnant.

“Musically all of these frickin’ melody plugin chord things on Ableton and other machines, everyone is just obsessed with putting so many melodies into their tracks,” he says. “Melody is the wobble from dubstep, to me. That’s what’s happening right now. All these tracks sound the same, there’s like 100 arpeggiators on top of 100 chords. It’s just like, melody is the way that people are judging what makes a song good, and I feel like they’re missing a whole element of sound design and energy and creating a feeling — when you watch a movie and it makes you feel sick, or it makes you feel excited or nervous.”

Once they’ve made these feel-good tracks, Lambrinoudis feels his peers are too proud of themselves. “Socially, everyone’s in this congratulatory period where everybody’s just like jerking each other off,” he says. “That shit just makes me shrug my shoulders. I feel like there’s a lot of talent in this city’s electronic music scene, and there’s a lot of people making cool shit, but nobody’s breaking through. Nobody’s leaving town…. Where’s the punk rock? Where’s the tour van to Winnipeg? Where’s that sacrifice?”

Finally, Lambrinoudis is frustrated with Calgary’s nightlife, which he feels is playing it too safe. “Pretty much the whole nightlife is being run by corporations, except for Broken City,” he says. “The people who have notoriously run the bars in Calgary have really monopolized what they’re doing, and it bottlenecks what kind of shows happen and how far the artists in this city can move around. People don’t take chances on really difficult music. And with the recession, there’s no money to take chances on shows that aren’t going to be packed.”

Rather than sit back and whine, Lambrinoudis has decided to do something about it. “Previously I just had to take it in the ass, so to speak, with the kinds of shows I could do, because I didn’t really have any disposable income and I was in a situation where I was in school and I didn’t really have the energy to put that stuff out there,” he says. “Now I’m done school and I’m kind of pissed off and fired up.”

“I don’t want anything from this,” he continues. “I don’t want any fucking spotlight on me. There’s really talented people out there who don’t have the chance to play a lot of shows that I think do have an audience and do have a really interesting thing that nobody else is doing that need to get out there. I want to do this label. And if no bar will do my shows, fuck it I’ll take it to the basement of somebody’s house. That’s the level I’m at. I would rather ten people in the room for something that’s never happened before or something that’s really unique than the same shit every night at these bars.”