With their main headquarters in Thessaloniki, the Backwater Project is experimenting with the limits of electronic music, with a wide number of releases, and their notoriously dark appearances.
The Backwater Project consists of a group of musicians from Thessaloniki, whose core is Damcase, The Shooz, Emdy, Dans Mon Salon and Underwater Chess.
Launched in 2005 to coincide with a compilation showcasing some of the city’s independent producers, it has ever since attempted to fill the gap in the city regarding ways in which the public can discover new electronic music. “From the outset the collective was given the polymorphic nature of our sounds. From new jazz, future soul and broken beats, to experimental electronica, techno and house.”
The influences are not specific “Everyone is completely different sounding and this is what excites us all, the new and unexpected” Indeed at times people such as Iron Dose, Alex Tsiridis, Leaf, Mr. Lookman and Echonomist camera have been involved. The individual members have participated in various events such as the Synch and Reworks festivals, Pixel Dance, Getropic and More Than Jazz, while also organizing their own evenings in various places. “Every time the set up is different; Usually performances are completely improvised and are accompanied by real time visuals”. The group has also set up the label ‘Ten to Go’, a home for the founders, which is characterized by a dark tone, running the gauntlet of noisy techno and experimental electronica. Their last album was a collection, which was an experiment to determine whether the coexistence of different team members can be attributed to a single music release. The Backwater Project is a concrete example of “how music can be something far broader than what people expect today.
In Greece there are so many stereotypes all running commercially so people do not have easy access to different types of music”. The result of which is the distribution of their music through the internet as an experiment to see how letting the music out of our hands and the narrow context of Greece can be perceived by the wider world.
