fragments from reviews for The Thing like Us (CD)

‘Yannis Kyriakides’ music is instantly recognizable… his Conspiracy Cantata (2001) derived its material from clandestine espionage codes, transforming them into an enigmatic labyrinth of electronic pulses and masked texts. This new project is a realization for CD of his theater work SPINOZA: I Am Not Where I Think Myself To Be and once again his hybrid of electronics and shrouded texts has an inscrutable quality that relies heavily on the influence of the unsaid. Based on texts by Baruch Spinoza concerning definition of the emotion, Kyriakides sets out to explore how the 17th century Dutch philosopher’s concepts mirror our own emotional responses to music. His barebones ensemble of voices, harpsichord, percussion and electronics is deployed with cool detachment, a hook that allows Kyriakides to plant within the music subtle graduations of suspense and momentum.’ / The Wire, Nov. 2004

‘Kyriakides’ composition is parallel to Spinoza’s vision of the emotions - it is a continuous stream of sound… the dark nasal voice of Ayelet Harpaz gives Spinoza’s Latin a mysterious side, which is assisted by the singer’s modal medieval melodies…. The music keeps with Spinoza’s scientific detachment from the emotions, and has something serene and majestic. It develops with a subtle tension… and creates true moments of the darkest and deepest beauty’ / NRC (NL)

‘a joy for music lovers who look for something extra’./ Rifraf (B)

‘Definition with which to catalogue this product and describe the beauty of its composition do not exist. The CD forsakes sound in the traditional sense and embraces a context in which the different aspects of art (visual, vocal and sonar) blend and compliment each other like in a masterpiece.’ / Music Club (I)

‘The electronic sounds form an organic entity with the acoustic… this is no easy CD, but whoever will be open to it, will experience a very intriguing world of sounds, which blends old and new.’ / Kindamusic.net

‘Yannis Kyriakides is a wondrous discovery for me as a music connoisseur... I may have listened to more modern music, not least electronic and electroacoustic, than most contemporaries, which is why I am even more surprised at how I receive this music. To me there is no doubt that Kyriakides’ sound art is comparable to the most delicate, refined, most transparently sophisticated of all the music I have ever heard, counting even the giants of modernism that I have come to know also personally, like Stockhausen or Riley…
The sound commences inconspicuously enough with just a hint of a breath, as the narrator/singer inhales to start her withheld kind of reciting, and the harpsichord utters sparse, one-letter metal pitches. A long, thinned-out but persistent and finally piercing – by virtue of duration – electronically achieved tone, almost without overtones, accompanies the now almost declamatory, spoken-sung words of Spinoza, in an incredibly glassy, brittle, Medieval kind of atmosphere, where everything seems to be happening like condensation on a wine glass, so transparent, translucent, like a bleak ray of light shining through stained-glass windows high up in a sacral space, life itself a soaring, suspended quality in the air, under the lofty dome of existence.
The first time I heard this Kyriakides music I was overwhelmed by this lightness of touch, this almost incredible transparence, as if the sounds were in fact just gestures of silence in a soaring, vertiginous moment in endless time… and I still listen in a kind of awe; it doesn’t cease! Such is the beauty of this acoustic/electroacoustic interpretation of Spinoza. Never could he have asked for a better exposure, had he ever imagined one in his distant future. If ever there was magic at work in music, it is to be experienced here, in The Thing Like Us, by Yannis Kyriakides. / Ingvar Loco Nordin, SONOLOCO (S)