Chrysakis, Thanos - Klage
SKU
TRRN 0101
"Thanos Chrysakis is a London-based composer/vibraphonist/ installation-artist. His musical output consists of microacousmatic and instrumental compositions, as well as sound installations/ environments. His music and sound work has appeared on various independent labels and events in various countries. His work Inscape 5 was amongst the selected works at the International Competition de Musique et d'Art Sonore Electroacoustiques de Bourges 2005 in the category œuvre d'art sonore électroacoustique, while Nekyomanteion received an honorary mention at the 7th International Electroacoustic Competition Musica Viva in Lisbon. Klage contains compositions based on a relatively wide range of timbral, rhythmic and melodic material, aiming to achieve a confluence between its structuring forces; acoustic instruments and electronic sounds. It is preferable to be listened to not as separate tracks but as an aural manifold of different distances/proximities, and contours; at times creating a sense of hovering, suspending time, while at others a more directional trajectory."
"Greek born, London based composer Thanos Chrysakis expresses admiration for Olivier Messiaen, and there are echoes of the French composer’s harmonic procedures throughout Klage, not only in 'Immanent Distance', an improvisation by Chrysakis on vibraphone and Dario Bernal Villegas on piano, and the interlocking all-interval tetrachords of 'Isabelle'. But unlike Messiaen, Chrysakis creates music with no discernible foreground or background, but made up of interpenetrating layers creating a network of cross-connections; the result has more in common with post-Lachenmann New Complexity than with the spacey, SuperCollider-esque laptoppery it superficially resembles. Bowed and struck percussion provide much of the source material for Chrysakis’s electronic transformations, from the singing bowls of 'What Lasts Is What You Start With' and the tubular bells of 'Downstream Prism' to the mildly disturbing shuffles, thuds, and gasps on the closing 'Childhood’s Vertigo', also sourced from an improvisation with Villegas. The appearance of a memorable spoken quotation from Lar’s Von Trier’s Europa towards the end of the album’s most substantial and accomplished track, 'Nekyomanteion', comes as something of a surprise, and yet it’s entirely in keeping with the poetic mystery of the music’s ghostly, subaquatic assemblage of crackles, moans and delicate chimes. The album title puns on German and Greek, meaning both profound grief and the clang of clashing swords in battle, and there’s a sense of both throughout this arresting and powerful work."-Dan Warburton, The Wire #283
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