Independent / Interdependent documents a singular meeting between Savina Yannatou (voice), Gonçalo Almeida (double bass) and Costis Drygianakis (electronics), recorded live at the Take 2 Festival in Thessaloniki’s Mikri Skini in March 2025 and released by defkaz records. The album’s title is both description and method: over the course of the performance, the three musicians continually renegotiate the line between autonomy and entanglement, between parallel trajectories and shared focus. Rather than treating the trio as voice “on top” of accompaniment, they work as three distinct but interlocking streams, each staking out its own space while remaining acutely sensitive to the others.

The sound world is dark, immersive and tactile. Yannatou deploys an arsenal of extended vocal techniques alongside more recognisably melodic fragments: whispers, breaths, glottal clicks, open‑throated cries and ghostly, wordless lines that brush against echoes of Mediterranean song before dissolving into pure texture. Almeida’s bowed bass generates deep, grainy drones, harmonics and percussive scrapes, sometimes moving as a second voice, sometimes as a slow‑moving tectonic plate under the soundstage. Around and between them, Drygianakis processes, distorts and refracts, using electronics to stretch time, smear timbres and fold field‑recording‑like artefacts into the mix. The result is a continuous, shape‑shifting fabric where it is often hard to say where one instrument ends and another begins.

At a structural level the music foregrounds process over pre‑composed form. There are no fixed pieces; instead, the trio let sound develop organically, allowing textures to thicken, thin out or abruptly pivot as new connections suggest themselves in the moment. Independence and interaction are treated not as opposites but as poles of a spectrum the musicians slide along: a passage might begin with three clearly differentiated layers, then gradually coalesce into a single, massed gesture, before splintering again into separate strands. Tension and release emerge naturally from these shifts rather than being imposed from above, giving the performance an almost geological pacing - slow, inexorable, yet punctuated by sudden fractures or surges.

The album also functions as a compact portrait of three distinct practices. Yannatou, long celebrated for her ability to move from folk song to free improvisation while redefining the voice as an instrument of boundless colour, brings a decades‑honed sensitivity to timbre and silence. Almeida, a central figure in European improvised music, draws on jazz, rock and experimental traditions to push the double bass into zones where pulse, texture and melody constantly exchange roles. Drygianakis, a pioneer of electroacoustic collage and sound art, uses live processing as a way of bending real‑time interaction toward the uncanny, blurring the boundary between structured and spontaneous sound. Together, they turn a single evening at Take 2 - captured by Christos Megas, mixed by Almeida, mastered by Sotirios Koufaelas and framed visually by ajax19’s design - into a study of how listening, responding and risk can generate form from the ground up. Independent / Interdependent is, in the end, music about the dynamic space between musicians: a document of three people holding that space open until new structures, and new kinds of tension, emerge of their own accord.