From 2020–2021 the lab engaged six sound artists and composers of electronic or electroacoustic music, selected via open call, who were invited to interact with the vast archives of KSYME – the Contemporary Music Research Center in Athens – with the aim to create new works. Under the guidance of the sound and media artist Anke Eckardt and Athens-based artist and educator Akis Sinos, the artists Alyssa Moxley, Gaspar Cohen, Giulia Vismara, Max Eilbacher, Savvas Metaxas, and Sofia Eleni Xezonaki imagined and sought possibilities of reworking archived materials, for example via re-interpreting scores, concepts, compositional methodologies, and personal/ historical narratives. The resulting compositions were premiered at the Athens & Epidaurus Festival in October 2021, and then reworked for this release.
With the exception of Sofia Eleni Xezonaki who created a sculptural work, these pieces have been assembled into this album, and are further detailed in a companion booklet that contains texts by the artists, their mentors, and a portrait of KSYME from its founding in 1979 until the present by the artist and educator Ioannis Kotsonis. The booklet is included in the album download.
Chronotopia Echoes / Αντηχήσεις, by CTM Editions
Chronotopia Echoes / Αντηχήσεις, by CTM Editions
Sofia Eleni Xezonaki’s installation »Post Kollisionen« was inspired by the score »Kollisionen« by Anestis Logothetis, who became internationally known for his peculiar system of graphic notation. Using broken items found in the garage of her childhood home and trash from her everyday life during the creative process, Xezonaki assembled items that suffered collisions in their own way, to bring Logothetis’ graphic notation into physical, three-dimensional space.
The album begins with Alyssa Moxley’s »City Replica Souvenir,« a composition reflecting on the pioneering composer and KSYME co-founder Iannis Xenakis’ unrealised »Athens Polytope.« Moxley attempts to deconstruct the sound politics and massive coordination inherent in Xenakis’ city-sized proposal to a smaller, souvenir-sized aesthetic abstraction.
Aiming to reflect on the emergence of digital objects and a persistence of synthetic environments, with »Iterative Cast« Gaspar Cohen documents a saturated digitality seeking a post-machinic dream, with sounds aimed at a purge of the industrial consciousness, a noisier-than-desirable ambience at the brink of a destructive accumulation.
Xenakis’ Polytopes are revisited in Giulia Vismara’s »Sound Gleams from the Deep Darkness,« a composition that transitions from a contrast between a darkness intricately woven with micro-events embedded within the texture of sound, to a luminous expanse filled with bursts of light that subsequently dissolve, only to reconverge into darkness once again.
A stereometric drawing by KSYME co-founder John Papaioannou, and the lack of context around it, inspired Max Eilbacher to create »Partial Patterns.« Converting the flat drawing of three-dimensional space into 3-D structures, and applying sieves to create rhythmic and timbral elements that are independent of time, Eilbacher’s piece is an attempt to translate the unclear possibilities represented in the drawing into the sonic realm.
»MACC« by Savvas Metaxas is an interpretation of the work of Michael Adamis, a composer rooted in both modern Western and older Byzantine music traditions. Referencing several compositions by Adamis and using modular synthesiser, reel to reel tape players, and samplers, Metaxas plays with a delicate balance of tradition and modernity that was also at the core of Adamis’ work.
Released April, 2024
Chronotopia Echoes / Αντηχήσεις took part within a wider project titled Chronotopia, initiated by CTM Festival and Goethe-Institut Athen. Through several events and commissions the initiative aimed to highlight connections between experimental music, research, and media practice, for instance via re-articulations of pre-modern musical forms and practices, media-archeological research, or archives amongst others.
Co-produced by CTM Festival, Goethe-Institut Athen, Athens & Epidaurus Festival. In collaboration with KSYME/CMRC.
Mastered by Rashad Becker, Berlin.
Artwork by Vojd.
CTM Editions 001
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