MARKOS VAMVAKARIS - Death Is Bitter

Rebetika is the sound of Greece and Asia Minor clashing amid civil
war, mass population exchange, and the anarchy of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. Poetic, mournful, and bitter, rebetika
music was born in the hash dens (tekes) of Mediterranean ports, its
verses whispered in Greek prisons before spilling out to the greater
population in the 1930s, propelled in no small part by a series of
remarkable recordings by Markos Vamvakaris.
These recordings, incredibly rare and expertly remastered, mark the height of rebetika, the brief period
between the music's emergence on the recording scene
in the early 1930s and government censorship of all
lyrics starting in 1936. During the Axis occupation there
was no rebetika recording, and though Markos had some
hits in the years after the war, he never again attained this
level. These are the dizzying, entrancing, and heaviest
works of one of the great artists of the 20th century

Vinyl release of Markos Vamvakaris - Death Is Bitter. Released through MISSISSIPPI RECORDS and available on LP.