ATHENS IN A LOOP: LISTENING TO LENA PLATONOS AFTER THE CITY

Having just returned from Athens, listening to "An Unsolved Exercise" feels entirely different — more immediate, more rooted. The city lingers in the track now: the sun-scorched concrete, the static of late-night radio, the quiet tension that lives in its shadows and stairwells. Lena Platonos doesn’t just sound like Athens — she is Athens in its most introspective form. Walking those streets, hearing that language in real life, sensing the weight of history layered over daily routine — it all makes her work feel less abstract and more like a mirror. "An Unsolved Exercise" no longer plays like an avant-garde artifact; it feels like a private message overheard in a metro station, too personal to repeat, too cryptic to forget.

I play "An Unsolved Exercise" and immediately find myself in a suspended state ("si nuk e njihja me perpare kete artiste"), as if stepping into a room where time is paused and language becomes abstract. Lena Platonos delivers each line with clinical precision, her voice detached yet deeply evocative, more declaration than performance. The synthesizers pulse beneath her words with calculated restraint—mechanical, unyielding, yet oddly intimate—creating a sonic landscape that feels both sterile and emotionally charged. Nothing in this piece is offered for comfort; there is no resolution, no climax, only a persistent sense of interrogation. The repetition of the phrase “an unsolved exercise” doesn’t seek an answer—it is the answer: a metaphor for incompletion, for thought in motion, for the existential ambiguity that defines much of Platonos’ work. This is not a track that resolves or explains; it resists closure, and in doing so, it invites a different kind of engagement—one that requires presence, reflection, and a willingness to sit within uncertainty. It is less a song than a psychological environment, meticulously constructed and intentionally left unfinished.