The record is filled with compelling soundscapes, in which a lush minimalism worthy of Vangelis’s score for Blade Runner is periodically interrupted by noises that conjure a horror-film atmosphere.
But that’s only part of what makes it inspiring.
The album is the work of one man, Theofil Tsiolakakis, who has been feverishly working away in his Thessaloniki home for over a decade, releasing music so quickly that even the most devoted listener would have trouble keeping up.
Unfortunately, that demographic seems vanishingly small.
Tsiolakakis’s YouTube channel only has 718 subscribers as I write this. Most of the music “videos” for Online Decay, which either show a static image or a black screen, have well under 100 views.
In other words, it’s hard to imagine a less popular artist than Mean Flow. Whether because he lives in a place far from the centres of the alternative music industry or simply doesn’t understand how to grow his brand, Tsiolakakis narrowly avoids becoming the proverbial tree falling in the middle of a remote forest.
It’s a depressing fate for music that successfully walks the razor-thin line between background and foreground, encouraging both immersive listening that keeps forgetting the music is there and the sort of focused attention which the ambient genre rarely invites.
Every time I started to get comfortable with a track, I would be startled by disturbing sounds. On several tracks, I thought I heard the screams of a creature suffering terrible torment. By the time I reached “Black Sheep,” I was certain that the comparatively normal bleating heard in the opening seconds was foreshadowing a very dark outcome.
Although there aren’t any lyrics and the liner notes are extremely sparse, I was rapidly convinced that Online Decay was trying to communicate an existential despair which mainstream popular music relentlessly seeks to disguise or deflect.
Even if Mean Flow isn’t for everyone—or most people, really—the album would certainly hold appeal for many more listeners than Tsiolakakis has been able to reach.
Rather than rue this state of affairs, however, I want to recognise that his work provides a wonderful opportunity to rethink our conception of value.
When I first visited his page on Bandcamp, I was shocked to see that Tsiolakakis was asking listeners to pay over 300 Euros for his digital discography. And then I saw that it contains over 300 releases, for an average of nearly 30 per year since his first record debuted in 2014.
Insane productivity.
The question is how to stress that adjective. Is it “insane” in a good way, the sort of accomplishment that imparts an experience of the sublime? Or does it, rather, signal that the human being responsible isn’t right in the head?
People like me, who remember life before the internet, were programmed to believe that less is more and that necessity is the mother of invention. Our thinking about culture struggles to keep up with possibilities opened up by constantly expanding digital storage.
But aesthetic preferences based on scarcity are poorly suited to a world in which the relationship between quantity and quality has been radically transformed.
While it’s still possible to be the kind of artist who prioritises restraint, that means going against the grain. The current trend for content creators is to adopt the channel model, in which consistency and variety are the guiding principles.
The point is to sustain a flow that is sufficiently interesting to prevent people from changing the channel or to persuade them that returning to it later would be a worthwhile use of their time.
It’s no accident that Theofil Tsiolakakis named his project “Mean Flow”. His music carves a deep bed and keeps replenishing it with new content. If that runs the risk of depositing too much silt along some listeners’ neural pathways, so be it.
Whether his productivity represents a deliberate repudiation of the austerity imposed upon his native country in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse or responds to it on a more unconscious level, there is no denying that Mean Flow calls into question longstanding assumptions about how artists should regulate themselves.
The more I understood this dimension of Tsiolakakis’s work, the better Online Decay sounded to me.
When I interviewed Andi Toma from Mouse on Mars in the early 2000s, he contrasted the quantity of music the groundbreaking electronic duo was making with the tiny percentage of it they were able to include on their official releases.
Within that framework, he explained, albums work the way snapshots did before the era of digital photography. Whatever their merit as stand-alone artefacts, they also have an ostensive function, directing our attention to a creative process that exceeds all bounds.
As a quick scan through Bandcamp’s offerings makes clear, this quality has never been more prominent. Many artists make it possible to purchase their entire discography at a reduced rate. Others offer fans the opportunity to become subscribers, paying a small monthly fee to ensure that new releases keep coming.
Because the quantity of material on the platform is so overwhelming, matchmaking is very hard. Unless a record is featured by Bandcamp itself or one of the people who regularly write about their offerings, it runs the risk of suffering the fate that seems to have befallen most of Mean Flow’s output. But there’s always a possibility of a connection happening, as this piece demonstrates.
I don’t remember what I was hoping to find on Bandcamp when I discovered Online Decay. All I can recall is my surprise at having no desire to move on to the next record. Once the music’s horror-film dimension began to make its presence felt, I was hooked.
I sampled a lot of Mean Flow’s records after becoming acquainted with Online Decay. Perhaps I’m suffering from recency bias, but I think the new album is among Tsiolakakis’s best. He seems to have mastered the art of building tension without pushing too hard or too fast.
Considering how many Mean Flow releases there are, it’s a great sign that the music still seems to be getting better.
Instead of regarding the scope of this content as a byproduct of mania, we might instead conceptualise it in terms of Andi Toma’s metaphor from over two decades ago.
When every snapshot came at a palpable price, the idea of taking thousands seemed hopelessly profligate. But once the cost of recording and storing that volume of images fell so low that increments barely register, the impulse to economise no longer served much of a practical function.
Of all the tracks on Online Decay, it’s “Infinite Time in Space” that best conveys this message, conjuring a vast auditory realm in which excess no longer feels possible.
To be sure, the fact that this track is sandwiched between soundscapes of a more disquieting nature suggests that terror might be lurking somewhere in that expanse, should we get close enough to hear it.
As the suffering meted out to Greeks by Germany and the EU more generally demonstrates, however, it’s far better to have a surplus than a deficit.
The most exciting thing about Online Decay is that the record reminds us, as the title of another recent Mean Flow release declares, that “death gives life”.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
