Grown weary of the played-out tropes of today’s musical landscape? Tired of songs being over before they even began? Find yourself craving experiences that go deeper than surface-level bangers? Dimitrios “Myselor” Chasouras’ new album has got you covered!
A solid seven years from initial idea to full release, with stepping stone EPs and theme-reframing samplers paving the winding road leading up to it, the Greek talent’s sophomore long player Cosmic Expression had sky-high expectations attached to it – but his vision was always bigger than even that.
Having circumvented a lot of the usual conformity mechanisms of the scene by working together with artist-first collective Evolution Chamber, the end result was able to stay as uncompromising, as unbridled, and as unabashedly blasphemous towards the algorithm gods as its creator intended. Across its 20 (!) tracks, it not only treats the attentive listener to stunningly produced journeys through ambient, breakbeat, and dubstep, but also delivers an avalanche of drum & bass more soul-nourishing, more inspired, and more emotionally resonant than most, if not all, of its contemporaries.
In this first-ever in-person interview of his, we chat about the fascinating process behind this genre-bending journey of an album, peel back the layers of what it means to be an artist in this age of overabundance, and examine his earliest days as a musician.
Congrats on the achievement! How does it feel to get this massive project out for you?
Thank you very much. I don’t know yet actually. Usually when I release something, I’m only realizing what I have done after the release. I have listened to it more than anyone, of course it is a relief. I have experienced all the process of making the album, so it’s very different for me than for anyone else, who can just listen to all the tracks now. I know them from when they were ideas, from when they were invisible. For me, they have been released at the moment I made them!
It’s like a birth – metaphorically speaking. Giving birth, or being part of it, the peak moment is when you experience that birth. Other people, however, will only see the baby maybe three months, or a year later, or whenever it’s ready to be shown. It’s a continuous process!
When did you know that you were done with the album? It’s certainly larger than the standard issue 12 tracks!
I knew that I was ready to start building towards an album back in 2020, when it first appeared in my mind as a concept. So I made these EPs – Evolution, Rebirth, Soul Power, Intuition. Then I started working on something bigger than these usual five track releases. I had made fifteen, sixteen tracks, and still had four fitting older projects, which I had made during the time period of those previous EPs. I cannot tell you a specific date when it was done, all I know is that the process just felt complete to me. All these things are very relative, you cannot find a beginning and an end. It is just pure self-expression. What is yourself? It’s impossible to define, it just exists.
Makes sense! How was the tracklisting process for you?
I did the tracklist at the very end. When you are in the process of creating stuff and making art, it’s just happening. I didn’t try to create a concept. All the things I’m saying on the album are things I read and experience in my life. I didn’t think about creating a story, there’s no story to create, I’m living the story. So it came natural to arrange the tracks one after the other. At some point I had the twenty tracks that ended up on the album and I just instinctively knew the tracklist, without thinking about it. It’s like seeing an album of pictures from your life, you just know exactly from which time period each picture is taken.
The tracks also have complete coherence, as in when the outro of the one meets the intro of other. That’s also just something that happened.
Oh wow, so did you work on it chronologically?
No, no. I was conscious it is happening, but I didn’t set out to do it. It’s like having pieces of a puzzle. You find one piece today, then another one five months later. It doesn’t matter in which time they belong, but at the end you will have all the pieces. The final image reflects the ideas and experiences I have had in my life. That is the point, to translate this experience correctly! That is the point of art in general, to connect and share the experience, truthfully.
It fits with your description of your art representing your life too. Life doesn’t always have clean phases either, it all influences each other, and comes and goes in waves. You can really feel that cohesion when listening!
Yeah, exactly. I cannot separate things. Even if I want to, it’s very hard for me to create boundaries and limits, it’s all just so connected.
How did you go about creating the samplers then? They are basically separate pieces of the puzzle, right?
It was another opportunity to expand more on the experiences I want to share. The full album is about conveying the core idea of “We are a cosmic expression”, but with the samplers I had the chance to talk about breaking the chains, the bad habits or the “programming” as I usually call it, the patterns we all have. They aren’t ours, they come from our parents, our society, from the environment around us. They prevent us from getting closer to our true selves. When you break these chains and reprogram your mind, you embrace the infinite and are now free to perceive the infinite possibilities of your life, which you previously couldn’t even realise you had.
Waves Of Change was about adapting to the flow of life, accepting change instead of resisting it, and opening yourself to new possibilities. Visionary Flashes was about the most enlightening moments of my life, going beyond familiar ways of seeing and exploring the deeper layers of perception and consciousness. Break / Urban Pulse was about somehow grounding the whole situation in the day-to-day, bringing these ideas back into human reality and making them a little bit easier to digest.
In the end, it is all about humanity! All of the ideas that are bigger than just people still come from about our collective lives.
Yeah, I’m not living alone in a cave. I am here, in this society, in this city. So if I’m going to make an album, I have to include the truth.
It reminds me of parts of a picture being framed in a different way, to focus on specific parts of a larger story and reveal new meaning. It feels very different from the usual single tunes before an album!
This whole album, and the direction I have chosen to take with it, is very different. I’m sitting at my studio making art. That art, the communication of the experience with people, and the market are very different things. I didn’t want to make something just to sell it. Sure, I’ll be very happy if my work actually brings me some profit, but that’s not the purpose of creating these projects. I think we need more honesty and pure connection, that’s what we are missing in the world around us. We don’t lack a market. We don’t lack money. We lack humanity, love, and expression.
Especially nowadays, it’s all so oversaturated. So having something that speaks honestly like this is very welcome.
Thank you. I just follow the excitement. I’m trying to create something I would like to see from an artist. Even if there’s only one person out there who connects with it, it doesn’t matter. I’m just trying to give what I want to see in the world.
The best case scenario for art, in my opinion!
It is also a domino effect, as everything is. I say, let’s create a good one. We have the choice, all the time, to positively influence those around us.
Exactly! An album that’s simply a collection of bangers is fine of course, but when you put so much thought, care, and of yourself into it, it can go so much deeper.
Yeah exactly, for me it is not fine, hah! I just can’t enjoy it. An album is like a book or a complete movie. What’s the point of having a one-hour movie that is just climax after climax with no inbetween, just because that’s what the market demands? To me, that’s disrespectful to both the listeners and the artists themselves. I find it very difficult to respect an artist who doesn’t approach their work with honesty and love.
For me, I have to dedicate myself to it, detect the emotion, understand it, and translate it into a language people can understand while remaining true to myself, my experience, and my creative expression. An album should be a complete, conscious, coherent work. Artistic expression and creating products for sale are two different things. Unfortunately, we’ve been so heavily influenced by marketing that we don’t even remember what a real work of art is supposed to be.
Each of the samplers, and the full album of course, also had their own artworks, what’s the story behind those?
The artworks of the samplers are parts of the full album artwork. Their colours all correspond to chakras. First we had Breaking Chains, with the light coming from the chest, using a lot of yellow, which is the plexus chakra. The power, the will – perfect for its theme. It is surrounded by the purple chakra, which stands for the enlightenment following it. Waves Of Change, on the other hand, is green, which is the healing, the acceptance, the love in the heart. The third one, Visionary Flashes, is the crown chakra, the enlightenment, the awareness. The fourth, Break / Urban Pulse, is black and white, with a little bit of red, which is the root chakra, the ego. The whole album is blue, the throat and third eye chakra – communication, expression, intuition. This is the core.
The main idea of the album artwork is a human being made of pure light, emerging through a cosmic portal that represents a white hole. The intro track, ‘Tekmor’ refers to the ancient Greek cosmology of Alcman, which later inspired Leucippus and Democritus. Alcman describes the birth of our universe from another existing universe through a very tight hole, calling this creation point ‘Tekmor’. This is very close to what modern cosmology describes as a white hole singularity. He then describes the opposite direction, where everything eventually ends in a second singularity through another tight hole, corresponding to a black hole. This is what the outro track, ‘Trust the Unknown’, represents.
I very much appreciate Seth Grymlife, the artist who created the artworks. He adapted very easily and very, very fast and gave the entire work a unique character, while keeping the central idea clear and intact.
Fascinating! Most of the album, aside from the occasional chanting or sample, focuses on the instrumental, with no fully featured vocals in sight. What was the reasoning behind that?
There is no specific reasoning behind it, I just made music with what I have in my studio. I don’t have problems with vocals in general! There is a sample on ‘Break’, like you mentioned. Before the drop of ‘Roots’, there is an Eastern vocal blended with a viola. It’s blended together so it doesn’t sound like either though, it’s just sound. So it’s not on purpose! I just trust the process. If, along the way, I meet someone that is a singer and we fit, I would be very interested in working with them, of course!
You also mentioned in other interviews that the music itself is your language, so perhaps adding another language on top could muddy the water so to speak?
It is an issue I’ve had with singing in music. If I’m going to have lyrics, they have to be very good. Of course, the best selling music has lyrics. People listen to the words, identify their experience with them, and it works better in the market as well. But I don’t want the people to think lyrics, I want them to experience sound. Sonic soundscapes. Something that they haven’t experienced before. I don’t want to trigger the listener’s mind with something they already have been thinking, I want to offer them a different perspective through an unique sound experience. The lyrics block you from that – most of the times. Not always!
The mind definitely starts paying more attention to the arrangements and details without lyrics. You get lost in it!
Everything can be a vocal. Every sound speaks from itself. If you actually have something to say, you will be able to translate the sound, making it speak your truth. Maybe this is why I didn’t hunt someone to sing in my tracks. I feel them to be complete. If I can translate the feeling I had, that’s all I need.
On the production side, was there ever a possibility to bring someone else into the process?
Yeah, sure! For this project, it just didn’t work. I’m actually much happier with the result now. I’m a very solo guy. I have of course collaborated with people, but it has to match. Everything we have been talking about here is how I treat my music, so if the other producer has different principles, it doesn’t work. I prefer to skip collaboration rather than making it for the collab’s sake. The point is to speak the same language, to be in the same lane.
Not a compromise, but more of a symbiosis!
It’s like playing! When we are playing a game together, to laugh and enjoy ourselves, it simply does not work when we can’t agree on the rules. The outcome should not be our concern, it should be the present moment, the creating. If we have fun, if we enjoy it, if we share emotions, that’s the point.
Speaking of other people, how did your connection with the Evolution Chamber guys come to be?
In 2025 during Let It Roll, the day I was leaving, I was at the airport and met Aaron and Flo Task Horizon. We had a very very nice talk, I felt very good with the guys. They were telling me if you want you can send us tunes and I was like I have about 20 tracks right now! Because of the human connection I felt with them, and the great communication we were having, I found it to be the best home for the album. The label is an actual Evolution Chamber. The entire album, all of the concepts, is just me. Nothing was manipulated, changed, or anything like that. They just took over the social media work, the press, the distributor work.
Thanks a lot to everyone at Evolution Chamber. James Magnetude, Aaron Task Horizon, everybody. Without them, this album would just be another unreleased project on my hard drive. This is the first time I’ve seen a label put the artist above all.
Exactly how it’s supposed to be! Let’s actually talk about the creation side a bit. You have mentioned in other interviews that you have used quite a lot of hardware for your track ‘Going Deeper’. Is that one a particularly hardware-heavy track?
‘Going Deeper’ was a case of me jamming with a modular and some synths. I wrote the lines and I just put them in an order that makes sense. The jam was like 15 minutes! In other tracks, there are a lot of synths in the intros, the breakdowns, the outros – where I have the space and freedom to do whatever I want to do. The drops always limit the sonic exploration a bit. Not because of any compromisation, but because of the loudness. Everything is so loud! In order to fit things with this amount of loudness, you must always remove specific frequencies. So you can’t really experiment with sounds that sit in those frequencies. In the intro, you of course have more space – it’s not as sub-heavy – to do different, weird things!
Did you also use the guitar that I’m seeing behind you?
Yes, in ‘Open Sky’! There’s a double phrase following part, playing the seconds. Not many Myselor tracks have this guitar, it’s more used in the ambient territory. ‘Universalis’ had this guitar as well!
Some might not realise this is already your second album. Your debut long player Parallel Consciousness actually came out in 2013. How much has changed for you since then? Is it even in the same realm?
For this one, the deeper desire was to make an album I am happy with. With the old album I wasn’t happy with the sound, but I didn’t have the tools. I was very poor back in Greece. Most of the time I didn’t have money to eat or stay somewhere, it was hard.
I just had a really crappy computer – in a house I tried to avoid staying in as much as possible – with 2 gigabytes of RAM and a 2.4 GHz processor, manufactured in 2004, if I remember correctly. I didn’t even have a sound card! The speakers were a HiFi system from 1999, directly connected to the motherboard. Beyond five channels the DAW started glitching – a nightmare! For almost 15 years, I produced many of the tracks with this setup. Some others I created in friends’ home studios, while I was temporarily staying with them. My track ‘Perspective’, for example, was made with a single speaker in the living room of an old friend’s apartment. It was a mess!
Amazing!
I couldn’t hear what I was doing, but I couldn’t stop making music. From then, I always wanted to do an album. I love the concept of the old album, of course I do, I believe it. But it’s difficult to listen to the tracks now, at least from my perspective. However, it is part of the process, it’s not something to hide. This is it, this is my life.
Going back even further, how did you get started with this project in the first place?
Myselor as an artist name started around 2008, but the project “officially” started in 2010. Before, I did a lot of hip hop, psytrance, dubstep, ambient, and a lot of experiments. I was also playing with the guitar back then kind of jazz stuff. I am from a village somewhere in Greece, I’m not from Athens! As difficult as it was for me to be so isolated and far from both events and people who enjoy the same kind of music, at the same time it also gave me the opportunity to explore music without being influenced by the current trends of the big city. I was doing genres of music I didn’t know existed. Back in 2008, I was making a kind of dark psytrance. I had never listened to that sort of thing before. Some other people would say to me “Oh you’re making dark psytrance” when they listened and I was like “Ohh, dark, … what is that?”
Hah!
It was pure experimentation, you know? I had a very intense experience with uplifting psytrance, the 90s kind. Greece has a really strong scene. That wave took me. It’s also the weather, the sun, the nature of Greece – it’s psychedelic. If you’re going for a walk, explore the actual nature outside the touristic guidelines, you will have an emotional experience. As beautiful as pictures online look, the feeling of being there is just so unique and powerful.
Back in 2019, you left all of that behind and moved to Berlin. How does it stack up against that?
Moving to Berlin and finally escaping Greece felt like waking up from a 30-year nightmare. It is my favourite city so far! And I don’t actually like cities at all. I like nature, no, I love nature. Berlin is the only city where I’ve ever felt happy. It was the first city where I didn’t have to explain what I’m doing or who I am. In other places, I felt like an alien, trying to explain this kind of music and my lifestyle to people. In other places, like Basel, which is where I live now, they have the money to organize events, but there is no cultural expression, no vibe – at least not in the way I experienced it in Berlin.
Looking ahead into the future a bit. What’s next for you, and Myselor in particular? Are you exhausted from the process? Or are you inspired to do more already?
Exhausted, no. I don’t work in the mines.
Hah!
Nobody is forcing me to do this. I do a lot of music in general. Myselor is only like 20% of the music I make.
Oh! Is the rest of it something you share with people too?
Not yet! I don’t feel ready yet to start that. It’s also very different. It’s deep listening, deep ambient stuff. Very experimental in a way. I’ve never listened to something like that myself. I will continue making what I make! Not at all exhausted. I always feel like I am somehow in the beginning of something.
Exciting! Any last words?
Yes, I would like to say that we are not something separate from the universe. We are it. The universe is constantly expressing itself, changing, creating, transforming – we must do the same. We sometimes forget this, because we become trapped in our own stories, habits, and limitations.
There is no empty space between us that separates us, but an invisible field that unites us. Loneliness is an illusion, and in this Western civilization of mechanistic logic, this illusion is getting stronger. The more disconnected we become, the more harmful decisions we make for ourselves and for everyone around us.
If we want to discover more and get closer to ourselves, we need to trust life and follow the deepest of our feelings: intuition, empathy, love. Don’t be afraid to open up to the people around you and admit that you, like everyone else, are a traumatised child. This plastic image of “everything is fine” needs to stop, especially in art circles.
So I would say, stop comparing yourself. Stop trying to fit yourself into someone else’s idea of what you should be. Trust your own experience. Trust life. Trusting the process is more important than understanding it.
Follow the rules of the universe instead of trends. The market has deadlines. The universe is infinite. And we are it.
We are a cosmic expression.
