Q: Hello Lee, welcome on Unmasked Magazine and thanks a lot for taking the time out for this interview.

How have you been? How have you spent these lockdown times? Have you been DJing more, maybe producing or simply discovering new music?

A: Hello guys, I’m trying to stay creative and busy in order to keep sane. I came to Athens for 10 days just before the first Lockdown in March 2020 and I find myself still here 14 months later. I’ve spent much of my time getting to know the city, walking alone with my camera. These myriad walks, along with many others in the streets, tunnels, alleyways, terraces and catacombs of Tunis, Palermo, London, Nablus, Hydra, Aperathou and Koufonissia over the past 18 months have been documented and curated into a series of images of a re-imagined city of Pandemonium. I have been working with فلج which is the new collaboration of sound artist Owen Pratt (Uncanny Valley) and singer and musician Julia Aaisha who have created an extraordinary sound recording for the slideshow of photographs. Their track will be pressed onto 7” vinyl in a limited edition of 123 with a different image on each cover. The piece is part of a much larger multimedia project called Pandemonium™ curated by our friends at Whatever Trademark™ in Portugal. Other than that I have also helped curate a 75 hour radio takeover on Root Radio Istanbul to raise funds for the Moria refugee camp on Lesvos that tragically burned to the ground last year leaving 13,000 people displaced. We are now working on a V/A compilation release to raise additional funds for the NGOS’working with the refugees on the island. I’ve been overwhelmed by the generosity of so many amazing artist friends on this project.

I’ve also made my first forays into production, collaborating with my dear friend LAW334 on one track Panspermia for his debut EP. We have just finished a second track, which will be released in July on a tribute compilation for Mak, the owner of Electrowerkz who very sadly passed away at the close of last year. We have also just begun work on a third track destined for a V/A release later in the year. I’m currently in the process of setting up a makeshift home studio in Athens and working on a commission from Theory of Yesterday for a soundtrack to a VR experience.

I have only DJed at one event in the past 14 months which was at Astron bar in Athens, just before we re-entered lockdown at the end of October. We put the decks and speakers in the windows and played to the people in the street, at one point we even had a DIAS police motorcycle team drive through the middle of the dance floor.

In terms of Khemia specifically I have widened the scope and vision of the label this year, in part reflecting the change from public to private listening. For a few months I toyed with the idea of setting up a sub-label to begin releasing more experimental projects, but finally decided that Khemia is an elastic enough concept to incorporate these more leftfield pieces. We have been releasing a new project each month since November including two albums and three EPs, also we are starting to collaborate with artists Oannes Slym and Sofien Mekni to make videos for the latest CASKO release Empires of Dirt which we are releasing next month.

Q: 2021 marks five years of Khemia Records. Can you walk us through the evolution of the label? Did the project go in the way you expected it to when you started it?

A: The label started when I met Pier di Sortie, the owner of Blackwater Records who had recently moved from Rome to London. He came to a few Kaos parties and we became friends. It was Pier who suggested that we create a new label connected with Kaos. I had been thinking along similar lines for a while but had no idea where to begin, so Pier’s knowledge and experience of the record industry was a huge help to get the label started. Our first cycle of split EPs were released according to the cycle of the Winter/Sumer Solstice and the Autumn/Spring Equinox and the second cycle related to the four stages of the alchemical process; Albedo, Citrinitas, Rubedo and Nigredo. We also organised a series of A/V listening events called Ambivalen+ at The Ace Hotel, The Institute of Light and The Yard Theatre where we invited artists such as Rrose, Samuel Kerridge, Codex Empire and Years of Denial to perform live. Since then, we have diversified the form to include single artist EP’s, V/A compilations and full albums. We have also started to move more towards digital platforms as the pandemic has wreaked havoc with the systems of vinyl production and distribution. I think we always conceived of Khemia as a very open ended project that would evolve over time.

Certainly when we started the label we never expected that our entire vinyl catalogue would be eventually acquired by the British Library, or that a substantial archive of images from our resident photographer Zbigniew Tomasz Kotkiewicz would be acquired by the Bishopsgate Institute. It’s a strange feeling to have become historicised!