Count G: Sound as Liquid, Thought as Flame

From Poetics to Psychedelia: A Journey Through Sound, Philosophy, and the Unexpected

At the intersection of political philosophy, ancient poetics and experimental soundscapes, you’ll find Count G. Stathis Gourgouris—a polymath whose creative compass defies category.

A revered thinker and writer whose work spans political theory, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics, Count G has long explored the layered relationships between democracy, modernity, and the poetic. But it’s through sound—fluid, unpredictable, deeply personal—that he finds his most intimate form of expression.

Though he won’t call himself a musician, Count G’s sonic experiments are anything but casual. As a founding member of the Sublamental label—an artist-driven enclave for experimental and psychedelic music—he channels a lifelong love of improvisation, noise, jazz, and field recordings into meditative compositions. Whether it’s piano, synth, clarinet, or something entirely homemade, his pieces emerge like crystalline echoes from a wandering, wondering soul.

In our interview, we dive into the mind of Count G: how he sculpts sound like language, how his philosophical work informs his art, and why his next creation is as much a mystery to him as it is to the rest of us. You don’t listen to Count G. You encounter him.

Interview by Leila Antakly

Q: Given your deep connection to music, from jazz and rock to laika, how has music shaped your understanding of the world? Do you see music as a form of resistance, and how can it be a vehicle for political transformation today?

Music is totally formative in my life. It’s my earliest pleasure as a child along with swimming in the sea. As early artistic experience it’s right along with fantastic literature—Gulliver’s Travels, Jules Verne, that sort of thing. My uncle was one of the founders of the Friends of Jazz Club in Athens in 1951, so I benefitted from his extraordinary record collection of jazz music, but also Cuban music, Brazilian bossa nova, and African music from the mid ’60s. When I was a little kid, I used to do my school work while listening to this music. I knew nothing about it then—I knew nothing of black culture in the Americas, which is the glorious essence of this music. It was pure sound to me, exotic, haunting sound, mind-altering. When years later I discovered its history, it blew my mind, but also confirmed this magic.

Of course, by generation I am a rock music person. Dance as an essential element of music is insurmountable for me. Perhaps through that experience, I came to realize that all music is pure body, even its most profound immobile contemplation. From the moment you realize that everything soars. Even the most complex sound, at the limit unlistenable, total noise, etc., or the simplest rhythm, the heartbeat sort of repetition etc.—all these became and continue to be endless pleasures for me. There is nothing like it—even literature, which I also love and to which, as a poet, I belong.

Music creates a whole other encounter with the world than does the perceptive and analytical mind. It's a perfect indication that the psyche is of the body, not the mind. Yet, as music is made by human beings in real life conditions, in societies and cultures and all that’s particular about them, it is a way of human beings making history, which they do at every moment of their life whether they know it or not. So this way, yes, music enters the political realm.

We can talk endlessly, with specific examples, about how music is politically transformative. True since archaic societies. The politics of the street always has music—it is music: the chants, the shouts, the clapping, the human noise. But also, music is a way of making peace, being at peace, in the fullest embodied sense of being. It is profoundly intersubjective even in the most solitary moments of listening.

Q: You’ve spoken about poetry not as an individual literary pursuit but as a societal force of creation and destruction. In an era of increasing fragmentation, how can artists and thinkers harness the poetic faculty to reimagine collective political possibilities?

When I say this I am referring to the ancient Greek meaning of poiēsis, which doesn’t just mean poetry but also to make something. Not in a technical sense—they had other words for that—but in the sense of creating forms, actualizing new ideas. In this respect, it belongs to the social imagination as a whole, not just a creative individual, an artist.

This way, as you said, an act of radical creation often involves an act of destruction—of previous forms, or inherited forms that up to that point might have been considered unquestionable, normal. So, the poetic force is a formidable human capacity, a unique part of human animality, which can soar to extraordinary outer edges of creativity even in the most incapacitated conditions, in the Gulags or Guantanamos of the world or in the rubble of Gaza.

The fragmentation you speak of is paradoxically tied to remarkable homogenizing of worldwide mindlessness: the cultivated distraction of the consumer-subject. Art as creative/destructive capacity resists this mindlessness. It happens with relentless focus and abundant pleasure, and it can never really be measured.

There is no programmatic way that I can point to how we overcome this fragmentation. I know from experience, however, that music flourishes in collective settings, in ensembles of people coming together to encounter each other in this language. And just like the politics of assembly, where people amass together in public action, it creates this environment of pushing into the unexpected, the unimaginable. We just have to do it. And keep doing it, no matter how hard things become for us.

Q: You’ve explored the intersection of poetics and politics in modernity. What advice would you give to writers, musicians, and artists seeking to create meaning amidst chaos?

There is no advice anyone can really give from outside. You just need to jump into the fray, seek the pleasure, and take the risk. It’s not an easy thing at all because everything around us has become intolerable for some time now and very dangerous in fact. So, we need to be thinking cleverly and creatively. Sometimes just going dancing with your friends might be the perfect act. Other times sitting silently in the middle of a busy square, or at the beach, or the soft-lit room of your home at night. Listening, thinking, voicing.

Then, the artwork just comes. It flows out, and you wonder where the hell did this come from?

Right now, we are in high-gear chaos, on war frontlines, and you feel constantly frustrated and exhausted. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I feel like crying, then the next day I am fine, and then again—not necessarily because of the day’s news, just an accumulated effect of unfathomable things happening at breakneck speed. As much as I can, I try to sit at the piano at night and just play for an hour. Just making sound. 

Q: Your early political awakening came through rock 'n' roll counterculture. Do you believe there is still a radical artistic movement today that carries the same spirit? If so, where do you see it emerging, and how can it be amplified?

You know, “amplified” is precisely the word that defines rock ‘n’ roll sound. But your question is hard to answer. No—right now I can’t see a radical artistic movement that carries the spirit of counterculture. And that’s a huge (and sad) realization.

Of course, there are young people everywhere who turn to art as a way of counteracting this egotistic consumer culture or the tyrannical violence of oppression. This exists everywhere in the world and it is essential that we seek it, that we learn of its existence and learn from it. And there are various mutual aid communities in many parts of the world. But I don’t see a counterculture movement per se. On the contrary, I see a reactionary retrograde movement. I hope I’m wrong.

Q: Your book The Perils of the One critiques the dangers of singular authority. In today’s world, where  authoritarianism is resurging, what role does imagination—both political and artistic—play in sustaining democracy?

This has been a particularly vexing question for me, especially as this tendency has proliferated and aggravated, and worse, it’s being supported by huge masses of people. What’s really worrisome is that authoritarianism is in fact desired—that people seem to want it, they relish it, it gives them meaning. Unfortunately, democracy has lost its allure, it has become a bankrupt notion, and as much as I try to give it new meaning, as in the book Nothing Sacred for example, it may be a burned bridge for many people, including people on the left.

No doubt we need to imagine new things, to think in new terms, perhaps with other words to describe what kind of world we want. This doesn’t mean we ignore the playbook of history, but we do have to realize that things have changed. The basic values of liberalism, which have governed the social imagination for the last three-hundred years—freedom, equality, democracy, justice, rights—are losing their luster and people are rejecting them. Understandably, of course, since liberal institutions have been shown to be partial and hypocritical in their representation and implementation of these values, but still questions abound: Why would people not care about freedom or justice? What makes them be like this? What makes them want to be told what to do, to be bossed around? Why do they adore authority?

I don’t really know how to answer these questions, even though I can explain historically how we arrived at this point. But we can’t imagine anything new while we desire what’s already available, if I may put it this way.

Q: What are your greatest musical inspirations?

Not easy to answer in a simple way. Certainly, a beacon for me has been the figure of Sun Ra. Not just musically, but the singular ethos of the Arkestra, the black myth equation philosophy, the unique entanglement of tradition and futuristic innovation, acoustics and electronics, free improvisation and discipline and so on. I was fortunate enough to see him perform and talk to him before he died—I find myself coming back to him and his spirit every time I feel that I’ve lost my orientation.

Another formative influence are the musicians and the entourage—a European network of independent music collectives known as Rock In Opposition—formed around the British group Henry Cow, which back then (mid to late 1970s) had a unique Brechtian understanding of how to entwine experimental innovation with leftist-feminist politics as a communal way of being. These musicians are remarkable because they never stopped this highly intellectual and yet passionate commitment to artistic creation as a way of life, independent of the market, collaborative, inventive, and relentlessly mobile all over the world. Fred Frith is a model in this regard.

But it’s not fair to narrow it down to some names. I listen to an inordinate range of music, and I can’t separate the influence between, say, musique concrète and reggae, bebop and punk, blues or pop psychedelia and various microtonal traditions, chamber music and free improvisation or spontaneous composition. And of course, Greek music, from rebetiko to Greek rock music. Moreover, the mixture of all that, which in my mind produces an endless possibility of sound ideas.

Q: Upcoming musical projects we should know about?

Well, Notnef Greco, which is an improvisational duo with my friend Deviant Fond, performed live two months ago at a California Institute of the Arts event, so we’ll be releasing the recording of this show on our Sublamental Records label this summer. I’ve just produced an electrofunk album by Masking Tapeworm, another one of our Sublamental bands, and I am working now mostly on music for art installations and animation, which I’m generally calling Saturn Research. This has a more ambient feel, and it’s really shaped by what the collaborating artists have in mind. A recent example is a work commissioned by Greek artist, architect, and author Zissis Kotionis, which was based on a Greek laiko motif that I am treating as a languid blues piece with ethereal voices.

You can follow Count G projects on my website or my Soundcloud page, where often I will upload early demos and experiments. But I do think exploring all of the Sublamental artists is worthwhile considering the fantastic range of music there—I particularly recommend the songwriting artistry of Todd Brunner, the psychedelic rock music of Cyanide Slugs, or the utterly unique sound of Laszlo Spatchcock, one of my favorite bands ever.