Seven years ago, Nikos Giannaris had never played bass, didn’t know what a guitar pedal was, and was sitting in his mom’s basement in Heraklion, Crete, figuring out how to record anything at all. Quarantine had cleared his schedule. He’d been playing acoustic guitar until that point. Everything else — drums, bass, production, mixing — he’d have to learn by doing it wrong first.
That project became Basal Ganglia. The new EP, “Celestial Warfare: Interplanetary uprising and the summoning of the Monster,” is its first label release: a 20-minute, four-part heavy psych piece pressed on cassette by Body Blows Records, Patari Records, and Underground Union Records, out since March 16, 2026. It’s Episode 1 of a planned sci-fi trilogy.
The lore is fully built out. The year is X40009t../3./. — humans have exhausted Earth and are now colonizing other planets with Stellar Machines, all of it powered by Plasma Water, a resource they extract by enslaving the Sala creatures of the deserted planet Sala.
The Salas are guardians, not warriors; their weapons are Salachutes, small flying creatures that communicate with their mother during flight. At the center of it all is Mother Salamander, the living heart of the planet, who rests in underground caverns overflowing with Plasma Water. When she rises, she doesn’t rise alone.
The Mothers of all planets are connected across the cosmos, and when enough damage is done, they summon the Cosmic Monster — “the Titan of the nebulas who comes from the celestial depths.”
Nikos cites King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Thee Oh Sees, and Slift as the main touchstones, describing the EP as a tribute to their influence on his approach to sound selection and composition.
The four movements — “Plasma Water,” “Cosmic Monster,” “The Uprising,” and “Salamander Queen” — play continuously across a single 20-minute track. Recorded and mixed at Pleb Studios by Nikos himself, mastered at Electric Highway Studio by John Vulgaris, with art and graphics by Loukas Kottas.
The solo format wasn’t a creative choice so much as a practical response to where he lives. “Forming bands in a small town as Heraklion has many obstacles,” he explains. “Bands sharing the same people, musicians leaving for a bigger city to find bigger communities, lack of drummers.”
Basal Ganglia was the workaround — a full-band project with one person interpreting every part.
“It took a lot of time to understand how a thing like that could be done, especially since I had no idea on how to play any of the instruments I wanted to play. I’ve never played a bass before by that time, or had no clue what guitar pedals were. Plus the recording process was something completely out of my ability at the time but I remember having crazy fun just for recording a bass line or automating the volume of a track. Something like a child playing outside, the simplest detail was something to scream about.”
The early stuff, he admits, isn’t easy listening — but he doesn’t dismiss it. “First full album attempts are something I wouldn’t easily listen to enjoy an album, but all this is a journey in which I’ve learned so many amazing things around sound, music and creation as an emotional experience that I can now use to create what I imagine. And these old projects are the reason.
Besides, to me they are emotional screenshots connected to periods of my life. Every listen carries the revival of a moment in the past.”
Five instruments, one person, no band to bounce things off. His workflow evolved into something deliberately modular: start with a bass line or drum groove, loop it until something on guitar starts to develop, let the loop thicken, treat each new layer as a new section, then see what the two sections do when placed together.
“It is always a back and forth movement,” he says. “Doing something in the beginning of the song affects something in the end of it, that after it is applied, it affects the middle section somehow and after this something else is affected and goes on and on. It sounds exhausting but this process creates a trance state that I find myself meditate in it.”
The harder problem is distance. Mixing and producing your own music means you’re too close to it, constantly pushing it toward what you imagined rather than what it actually is.
“I always find myself overthinking moves I not normally overthink when I work on other people’s projects and this leads to wrong decisions. It is mine but I should treat it as it’s not, because if I don’t do that, I will push it to be something I fantasize about it and not what it wants to be. Me and my friends believe songs decide on their own what they are. Every time I am trying to make something sound red when it wants to sound blue, I just make it stressful or overmix it for example.”
Heraklion is small, but Nikos is clear that the scene there isn’t thin — it’s just concentrated. The anchor is Stoa60, a self-organized DIY venue that hosts live sets every Saturday.
“For me this is the most important thing here for the community. It is a place where we meet and talk music while watching live performances, something so important for a small town as Heraklion. Concentrating musicians or music lovers this way strengthens relations and allow for new stuff to emerge.”
Beyond the venue, the network runs deeper — shared studios, borrowed gear, collective recordings, bands with overlapping members. “We use music (and not just music) as an important tool to fight individualism and radicalize coexistence. I might be working on a solo project but I am also a member of other bands in town which I love the same. One side offers me solitude and meditation and the other helps me experience the unique emotion of collective creating process. I would be nothing without my people and they mean everything to me.”
The cassette edition runs to 20 copies, each with a hand-drawn logo by Nikos and an individual number. Nine remain at time of writing.
Episode 2 of the trilogy has no announced date. Before that, a separate instrumental acoustic album is due in May.
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