BIOGRAPHY
βιογραφία
Rebetiko developed in the port cities of Greece at the beginning of the 20th century, at the meeting of the songs of the slums of Piraeus and the music brought by refugees from Asia Minor after 1922. Rooted in this urban tradition, but also in the dance tradition of the paniguri, these millennia-old village festivals, the melodies of Elektre propel us into the heart of a retro-futuristic and cosmopolitan world sound with trap and reggaeton accents, to make us succumb inexorably to the song of the sirens.
Born in 2023, the Greek-electronic folklore trio Elektre was immediately spotted by the Women Beats Support Scheme.
He was then supported by the Tamanoir and the MJC of Sceaux before being named "Coup de Coeur" of the RIF and then, in 2024, winner of the Prix des Musiques d'ici.
Monika KABASELE
Monika was born in Thrace, where the Aegean Sea meets the Turkish border. Her mother was Greek, her father Congolese, both music lovers, and her childhood was steeped in rebetiko and Congolese rumba. Monika took her first steps at panigiris, village festivals where people gather to dance in a circle and honor the enduring legacy of ancient pagan rites that have become Christian, to beat the earth to the rhythm of ancient songs.
.
She began as a rebetiko singer in the smoky taverns of her city, in the depths of cellars where drunkenness and dancing were the comfort of broken hearts, under the watchful and anxious eyes of her parents who saw her return home at dawn, reeking of alcohol and cigarettes. Refusing the minor role reserved for the voice in this subterranean, male-dominated world, she one day left for Paris to pursue her jazz dream.
Between jams, gigs, big bands and Elektre, Monika weaves sonic bridges between the Mediterranean, the Americas and Central Africa, inventing a Greco-futuristic language where memory and future intertwine.
MAÏLYS MALLET
Maïlys is the 4th generation of a line of French-Greek women writers and activists.
Her great-grandmother was the first journalist on the island of Lesbos. Her poet mother lived in Parisian squats, and her father, a drummer and capoeira dancer, had started a new family under the sun of Salvador de Bahia. Maïlys was thus raised at the crossroads of several worlds by her “Yiayia” (grandmother, in Greek), a historian and anthropologist who passed on to her her passion for Greek mythology. In the summer, they would go together to Euboea, to the family home built on the edge of a small, secluded beach, between the fishermen's stall and the taverna. In the winter, Maïlys crossed the ocean to join her father and her Brazilian brother.
From human beatboxing to the percussive spoons of Cappadocia, from a piercing electric voice to the deep singing of the mountains, from Greece to Brazil, Maïlys likes to make rebetiko more carioca than nature.
CLÉMENT BUFFIÈRE
Clément discovered Greece by following a hunch — a boat that sets sail randomly off the coast of Turkey, on which he embarks to live his youthful Odyssey. The island of Kassos, where he lands, sustains a preserved community living off village festivals and the return of sailors.
Adopted by the local musicians, Clément recorded them on several occasions, allowing them to record, distribute and promote their regional musical heritage beyond the sea; they taught him the bouzouki which he began to play during local panegyries.
Since then, Clément has been navigating between two worlds – that of machines and that of strings, of Parisian asphalt and summer evenings in Kassos, where the sea holds the memory of sounds. Elektre thus becomes the receptacle of this quest for hybridization between the codes of computer-assisted music, which he excels at handling, and the richness of rebetiko and Greek island traditions.