Semper Augustus

 "Semper Augustus" by Yannis Kyriakides.
Performed by Asko|Schönberg, Slagwerk Den Haag and Nederlands Kamerkoor.
Conducted by Bas Wiegers.
Recorded live at TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht, 9 September 2015.

Subvoice

 

”Sub voice” & ”Lunch music”, two new releases of Yannis Kyriakides on the label Unsounds

”Sub voice” contains 9 compositions relative to the relation in between speech, text, instrumental music and computer sounds. Nine experimental pieces which bring us in hallucinating landscapes similar as deep soft dreams.

”… the underlying idea is to explore what happens when material that has a clear semantic form, wether communicated in text or speech, is translated into the musical structure…”  YK

 "Lunch Music" by composer Yannis Kyriakides is a set of pieces for voices, percussion and live electronics, inspired by the 1959 book "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs.

The concept of the music revolves around the idea of the polyphony of voices found in "Naked Lunch".

 

YK - a portrait by Sara Morris

Yannis Kyriakides reaches the composition with an intellectual approach and a formal construction, but the results are not deprive of deep emotion. These two new CDs, ”Subvoice” & ”Lunch music”  prove it again.

”…The ‘perceptual’ in time based arts I define by how we perceive ourselves inside the music. The passing of time. How the space around us is changed by the music we hear. How we reflect on things that have happened a second before or an hour before. How the moment or the ‘now’ is expressed and perceived in relation to the duration that is set up in the music…” YK - 2003

 "...Lunch Music joue avec les sens et l’espace, contorsionnant le temps et les mélodies pour en élaborer un matériau musical aux images fortes et à la beauté radieuse, ensorcelant chaque sillon de leur impossibilité à s’extraire de la folie et des substances hallucinogènes auxquelles fait allusion Le Festin Nu (le roman) ..."   Roland Toress

"...for most of his (YK) work, he encodes the countless fruits of oral expression in immaculate contrapuntal designs. Not just as mere colors; rather, as transformed nuclei of primordial significance containing the keys to acknowledge a subtler level of comprehension..." 
 Massimo Ricci - january 2017

 Complete review by Massimo Ricci here

Song without words

A world premiere performance of the work of Yannis Kyriakides titled "Words and Songs without Words".
This work is a response to a quote from Felix Mendelssohn from a letter to to Marc-André Souchay dated 15th of October 1842. In it he explained his position regarding his Songs Without Words cycle, highlighting the opposite view he takes from the norm, regarding the relative meaningfulness of words in relation to music...
This piece explores not only the individual semantic problems of words and music individually but what happens in their combination when the music is forced into a linguistic function.

by Larissa Groeneveld - october 2012
@ Amsterdam Cello Biennale, Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam.

Katsaros

A tribute to the greek musician Yorgos Katsaros, who played a very unique style of "Guitar Rembetiko" in USA in the 20s and 40s,

Yorgos Katsaros biography

the song "Htes to vradi stou karapi"
from the album "Rebetika", 2010, published on Unsounds records.
performed live in 2011 by the guitar player Andy Moor & Yannis Kyriakides

Dreams of the blinds

"Dreams" is an experience of music mediated through animated text by Yannis Kyriakides

on his Unsounds label

"Dreams", collects the large scale ensemble works performed by Ensemble MAE and ASKO Ensemble.
The DVD is in PAL format and also contains the films in computer and mobile device formats, as well as MP3 Audio, and PDFs of the scores.
"Dreams of the Blind" recently received the Dutch Willem Pijper Prize for musical innovation.