Two members of the FSN team flew to Athens from New York to celebrate the grand opening of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC). FSN set up a portable street studio to engage with the crowds of thousands of Athenians who gathered to explore the expansive new center and its beautiful stages. 

These recording setups moved across the center grounds, occupying a different location on each of the three days. Audience members joined festival musicians for impromptu jam sessions, vocalizations and spoken word pieces. Following the festival, our team mixed down the results into a short EP which features fragments of Greek folk songs, jaw harps, storytelling, group clapping, and improved electronic beats, which was then shared with the participants. 

About Street Studios 

Street Studios take the basic elements of the music studio to a public place and make the process accessible to anyone in the surrounding area -- revealing a sort of sonic collective unconscious of a community. With a simple setup, musicians and producers begin a process of creating and recording music, while at the same time encouraging passersby to join in. Traffic, chatter, birds, stories, spontaneous songs are all incorporated into music composed on the spot. Often people will begin a musical idea only to have it finished by someone passing by an hour later. After the session, producers craft these recordings into cohesive pieces, attempting to capture the energy of the particular space. These finished songs and soundscapes are then shared with all who participated.