Yannis Kyriakides – Subvoice

yannis-kyriakides-subvoice

2CD + 44 pages cover booklet – Unsounds

Subvoice is a collection of nine recent works by Yannis Kyriakides. He is a sound-artist and composer of contemporary classical music, who explores new forms and hybrids of media. Words and Song Without Words, Paramyth, Toponymy, Music for Viola, Circadian Surveillance, Der Komponist, Testudo, Politicus, Oneiricon suggest a specific research on the concepts of voice and language. The music is built on traces of voices and texts that seem to speak or sing in an intimate form of dialogue, either as text that is directly encoded into music, or in traces of voice that are embedded and dissolved into the musical fabric. In the compositions where the text is encoded, this cipher music tends to highlight the similarities with the cryptographic tradition. “The words hide inside another medium, undecipherable to the ear,” Kyriakides says, “but with a score and the decryption cipher, the text can be uncovered and re-assembled.” We might object that every text can be transformed in music, but not necessarily. The music hides in the scores with the processing of formal structures and the information of predetermined data classes. The booklet notes by Yannis Kyriakides on the compositions are precious for understanding. The booklet also includes some drawings, pictures, collages and strange anarebus. These elements are more than a pretext to question the language functions and their syntactic structure, which sometimes depend on waves with their own sense and don’t need any “music didactic” supports. The last season tendencies show the attempts to fully enhance every audio expression deriving from a conceptual approach: we don’t find this attitude deplorable, but if we force our interpretation to more complicated and subtle levels, the results might be both an extreme poetry but also a fall of the artistic aims. Yannis Kyriakides works behind the scenes of our immediate perception, which actually does not need too many supports to be started: as usual, the quality of the research and the music implementations play the game and make the listening experience attractive.

 

Yannis Kyriakides – Subvoice