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"Continuing the saga that began with 2024's self-titled LP, a hazy deconstruction of Greek folk memories that acted as a prelude to the surreal Egyptian street rave experiment 'Hazlom', 'τρία' is enigmatic composer Aeson Zervas' most confounding set to date. He takes the opportunity to darken his shadowy autobiography; so far, all that's been revealed is that he's reclusive, based in Missolonghi in western Greece and can trace his ancestry back to North Africa - details get murky when examined further. On 'τρία', the contrast is intensified and the grain increased as Zervas stalks furtively through a moonlit fictionalized Mediterranean, rupturing his collection of gritty folk samples - remnants of rebetiko and ailing film soundtracks - with anachronistic drum machine loops and errant analog oscillations. If his debut was a hauntological artifact that addressed Europe's historical obsession with Greek culture, smearing tangible Hellenic soundscapes until they loosely fell into line with The Caretaker's reverberating flashbacks, Zervas' third chapter manufactures an unsettling fiction that hallucinates a parallel timeline. The album follows a thread from the tekedes, semi-legal social clubs where workers, refugees, gangsters and pimps would gather to smoke hash and jam on bouzouki, through the tavernas and back streets of Greece and Anatolia where early synth music melt into the memories, shuttling the chanted choruses and santur chimes into back room dancefloors and sweaty beachside raves. Whether any of this did or didn't happen is beside the point; Zervas' cultural references stretch out through ancient Rome and the Ottoman Empire, affirming an identity that's more real than reality itself. It's not made from fragments of commercialized, Eurocentric Greek history, but the dreams of half-remembered histories of the various different peoples who have moved through the Balkans and Anatolia for centuries. Tonally warped piano stabs and West Asian vocal forms breeze across squashed, decelerated kicks and bleeps on 'Χωρίς τίτλο 20', while Zervas fashions a fantasy ecosystem on 'Χωρίς τίτλο 22', using evocative environmental recordings and chiming exotica organs to imagine a marooned island far from the Caribbean. Busted beatbox rotations and detuned basslines follow lyra melodies and fragile vocals 'Χωρίς τίτλο 25' and when 'τρία' navigates towards its final stretch, hiccuping rhythms, blown-out acid squelches and slow, booming pulses shepherd the ornate traditional notes to their illogical conclusion. It's an album of divergences and contradictions that asks more questions than it answers, breaking apart the bright, white marble sculptures that lie behind glass in European museums and repainting the fragments in eldritch colors." Artwork by Marc Armand Mastered by Declared Sound "On a label full of weirdos, outliers, mavericks and freaks, clandestine Greek anomaly Aeson Zervas is Heat Crimes’ OG wildcard, landing a debut album a couple of years ago that sounded like The Caretaker channeling crates of rebetika, and now returning with this deeply elusive new LP of plasmic synths that unfolds in ways that will leave you with a proper motion sickness of time travel. Aye, it’s a special one. After lighting up 2024 with blink ’n miss LP & tape drops, Aeson Zervas’s 3rd instalment dips into a perpetual night world of cobwebbed keyboard melodies and flame flicker incantations designed to score your next regression session. As ever, the label and artist remain tight-lipped about pretty much everything, but the vibe is self-evidently clammy and febrile thru a dozen parts familiar to both preceding drops, woven between pillars of inspiration in lemniscate loops and free flowing rhythmelodic arrangements that bind his ideas to bezonked minds. The Mesolonghi-based enigma continues to prove a master of hypnosis and a conduit for ancient spirits seeping into the modern world, luring susceptible minds to states of bliss and dread, but not without that sense of romance that also lit up his prior releases. Once again feeling the same pull of past worlds as The Caretaker, only slanted to microtonal scales, his mix of lopped-off and extended melodies tell arcane stories still salient to contemporary imaginations able to tune in. Activating with a section of meditative, almost no-wave strafing discord, themes of shimmering exotica slide into backyard ritualism, with a lilting marimba sounding like it escaped a Martin Denny side before bleeding into a Giallo-esque wheeze, thru port and island-hopping rebetika, and properly haunting passages of midnight sacred music swarmed by cicadas. The 6th (Χωρίς τίτλο 23) part of needling Italianate arps and screeches is particularly affective, as is the plugged-in folkdance sputter of the 8th (Χωρίς τίτλο 25), and a final couplet coming off like Muslimgauze with a thing for sleazy horror, not dub."