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“I hate living people, because they never appreciate anything you do for them. The dead appreciate everything you do for them,” Chris King said from behind a plate of Mykonos Café’s chicken souvlaki, before explaining how he knows.

“They don’t say they don’t.”

King, who, in addition to working at Albemarle County’s Rebel Records, has made a career as an archivist, collector and producer in realms of music that sometimes only exist just below the ether. And for the past several years, the Faber resident’s focus has been on the crossroads of Greece and the Balkans.

A new compendium, “Why are the Mountains Black: Primeval Greek Village Music (1907-1960),” is out now on Jack White’s Third Man Records imprint.

“I really dislike armchair anthropologists,” King said, estimating that he’s visited Greece 18 times in the past four years. “The vast bulk of historical projects that are put out on music from outside of the United States — music in a foreign language — are horribly amateurish, like poorly researched or steeped in impression and nothing else. The other end of the spectrum are academic tomes; you put the CD in and fall asleep from reading the notes.”