yannis kyriakides

Mutability at Holland Festival

For Mutability, I asked twelve composers to write two to three-minute miniatures. Several will perform the music themselves, alongside musicians from Asko|Schönberg. The music is played live, but is also transformed by a series of algorithms that constantly mutate the pre-recorded visuals and sounds of the soloists. Soloists, visual projections and electronics meet in a hallucinatory space designed by Theun Mosk. The audience is free to move through a concert installation that is constantly changing and filled with ghostly reflections of the original miniatures. The identity of the instruments can be heard at times, but not always. Magical music grows out of the twelve crossing life paths to linger in for a while – the full six hours of the mutation process, or part of it.

Amsterdam City Composer

For the Day of the composer, I am ‘stadscomponist’ Amsterdam. I will be writing a piece that will be played at Amsterdam Central Station on the morning of 15th June. The piece is Clouds that Veil for voice (Aurelie Lierman), accordion (Claudio Jacomucci) and trombone (Sebastiaan Kemner). It’s a setting of the poem Mutability by Percy Shelley, which relates to the large scale work we are doing in the Holland Festival the week after.

Poster HF campaign

I was used on one of the images for the Holland Festival campaign this year. So kept bumping into myself around the city. “KesselsKramer developed a new campaign for the Holland Festival 2024, in which they focus on groundbreaking artists that are featured in the Holland Festival with photography by Blommers and Schumm.”

hypnokaséta CD release

Released on Unsounds, the piece that I had written for Quatuor Bozzini and Andy Moor in October 2022 as a CD.

“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)

Hypnokaséta (2020-2021) is a continous 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 piece was first performed under the name 'Cassettes' by Quatuor Bozzini and Andy Moor in October 2022, in Montreal and other places around Quebec.

Isles and Rivers in Berlin

Isles & Rivers project of Outernational had a return to Radialsystem in Berlin, where we made a concert and live recording for a release on Pantopia records. Featured are the pieces: Knowing Nothing and The Island Remained Silent. Before the main concert I did a listening session "Water Walls" with the writer Kübra Gümüşay.