ABOUT US

Manitarock (mushroom + rock), is a name that underlines the special relationship that the band members have with mushrooms and rock music. It’s about a band that arose spontaneously, around the midnight bonfire of the outdoor panhellenic mushroom festival. Manitarock are born and raised in Grevena, (and even today they all live there), a small town in Greek mountains, officially named as “city of mushrooms”.

Passing through rock, rebetiko, traditional bands and Byzantine choirs, a great breadth of a musical spectrum is created, which combines traditional with modern, seasoned with timeless and participates in the dialogue between the Greek, the Western and the universal.

The result of this dialogue is expressed as transcendence, both in George’s compositions and in traditional revisions (songs of Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, Smyrna, Pontus, Aegean and Grecia Salentina), rebetiko, folk and modern Greek songs, combining the unique interpretation of Despina and the rock style of the orchestration, lead to marriage with classic rock compositions, based on the age-old pentatonic scale.

So, the characteristic dissonances of Despina (Klisiari) and Georgios (Konstantinidis), combined with George’s bouzouki (a special instrument, with different tuning and elements, which sounds like a combination of lute, tambouras and guitar), are rhythmically supported by the drums of Demosthenes (Konstantinidis) and the bass of Georgios (Doumas), are melodically colored by the musical idiom of Grevena, due to the violin of Thomas (Tsiotikas) and updated instrumentally by the electric guitars of Thanos (Goudanos) and Thymios (Papastergiou). All the above, bring back to the present primitive melodies and rhythms, which are inscribed in our collective memory.