hypnokaséta
String quartet, improviser (playing cassettes and any instrument) and live electronics [45′]
Composed for Quatuor Bozzini between 2020-2021. Premiere in October 2022, Montreal, Canada.
hypnokaséta (2020-2021) is a continuous set of 16 pieces for string quartet, improviser (playing cassettes and any instrument) and live electronics. The source material is based on dreams that I had during the first few months of lockdown, April-June 2020. Accounts of these dreams are encoded in the music that is played by the quartet and also encrypted in the sound textures that surround this. The pieces alternate between quartet as the foreground and electronic interludes, where solos or duos underpin the soundscape. The title of the piece (Greek for ‘sleep-cassette’) refers to a theory of dreams proposed by Daniel Dennett, that says that dreams are loaded into consciousness like a cassette tape during the night and played just before waking.
- The government’s new cultural scheme
- All roads to the airport are blocked
- Everyone is nervous, everyone is lost
- London is covered in mud
- Coffee orders
- Invisible games
- Ingesting paint particles
- The reluctant hotel manager
- She lifts the mountain
- Bridges are being dismantled across the city
- Body swap opera
- Swimming pool synthesis
- The concert promoter complains that not much happens in the piece
- Tranquilizer
- Mutations on an empty grid
- A harpsichord in a derelict palace
“Kyriakides brings his customary vigour and rigour to the making of music that is nonetheless intriguingly cryptic and irreducibly strange.” (The Wire)
“The two 'worlds' integrate perfectly (sounding and dissonant strings, disturbing tapes and guitar, subliminal electronics) and the result is once again of exquisite and peculiar charm.” (Blow Up)
“This scintillating work by Amsterdam-based Greek composer Yannis Kyriakides evolved from a series of dreams he had during the early days of the pandemic lockdown..The occasional incursion of brittle, manipulated cassette noise pierces what is otherwise a richly meditative, rapidly paced series of episodes featuring textural drift, sparkling bursts of tart harmony, wiry counterpoint, microtonal electronics, and haunted tone poems, all rolling within and between one section to the next with impressive fluidity. (Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp, June 2024)
