CD – Unsounds

Asbestos was used by the ancient Romans to wrap corpses before cremating them, in order to obtain thinner and whitish-looking ashes. This nugget of information is probably not widely known. What is well known is how millions of people have suffered and died from tumours caused by inhaling the dust, which was extracted and used for industrial purposes. Unfortunately, asbestos continues to be used in many parts of the world, even though a large number of mines have been declared harmful and are no longer operational. Amiandos, in the Troodos mountains in Cyprus, is an asbestos mine that has been decontaminated and turned into a museum site. It is also the birthplace of Yannis Kyriakides’ father, a Cypriot composer resident in the Netherlands. Amiandos is one of the most interesting inspirations the sound artist has used for a project. Seven tracks on the album refer directly to the history of that place. As is often the case in Kyriakides’ work, literary quotations are superimposed on personal memories and sounds. This is the case of the first piece, “Side of the Mountain”, which explicitly mentions a text by Lawrence Durrell from the book Bitter Lemons. There is a paragraph, in particular, in which Durrell recalls visiting the mine, which appeared to him as a place with a supernatural atmosphere and a “raped” nature. Sensations that are rendered perfectly thanks to the somewhat synthetic vocal treatments and the rarefaction of the sounds, are sucked into a vortex of virtual energy. More nostalgic and imbued with chamber music passages is the subsequent “Thin Dust”, an stylistic exemplar of the composer, and in particular of his ability to merge classical and electronic music, electro-acoustic tradition and glitch sounds. “Cottonstone” boasts an extremely futuristic, more aggressive and noisy approach, while “A Ghost of Spring” returns to the ranks of leaner and more conceptual elaborations, made with fragments of archival recordings and environmental treatments. In “Empire within an Empire”, period recordings emerge, while in the penultimate “Enaerios” we encounter short smippets of commercial Greek music from the fifties. The final piece, “A Secret Lake/ A Million Voices”, finally alludes to the current state of the mine, to the healing values ​​of nature and to the possible secrets that such a place might contain.

 

Yannis Kyriakides – Amiandos