LP – Unsounds

Yannis Kyriakides is a Cyprus-born composer and sound artist (born in 1969), who emigrated to the UK in his early teens and then, after turning twenty, moved permanently to Amsterdam, where he now lives and works. Throughout his career, he mainly focused on the creation of new typologies and hybrids of media, which at the same time problematize the act of listening and present refined and complex executions and installations. The relationship between perception, emotion and language – and how the latter defines our experience of sound – is a central element of his work, now in particular marked by the relationships that are created between words and music, especially through the use of information systems, synthesizing voices and projecting musical texts. The idea of ​​only imagined and inner voices has always fascinated Yannis Kyriakides, who returns to Unsounds with Face, an LP in which the face and facial expressions become the prerequisite for poetic style exercises. For this project, the artist worked together with the Electra quartet, composed of Diamanda Dramm, Susanna Borsch, Michaela Riener and Saskia Lankhoorn (all musicians who use the voice and add instruments such as piano, keyboards and violin). All that remains for Kyriakides is to structure the individual songs meticulously and deal with the electronics. Here electronics are not foregrounded except in some vocal treatments. They are kept soft in other layers and include recordings of scanners and video projections. Naturally, the information that is obtained using special facial recognition software takes on an appropriate value as a data set and is not just a manifestation of emotion and identity, that is, it is imprinted as data the artist uses it according to specific parameters. The visual artist Johannes Schwartz and the writer Maria Barnas also contributed to the complex making of Face. The artwork includes some photos and lyrics from the two artists and was used also during the live performances. It is completed by a 12-pages booklet designed by the graphic studio Experimental Jetset. The listening experience is definitely enjoyable; the sounds are sweet and the contrast between chamber arias, voices and digital audio is vivid and unconventional.

 

Yannis Kyriakides & Electra – Face