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About the Artist
Presspectives

EQUINOX

Thanos Chrysakis

Duration 46.22 | Released December 2017

Composed—Mixed—Mastered by

THANOS CHRYSAKIS

Between January — April 2017

at Meridian Studio.

About the Artist

Thanos Chrysakis is a Greek composer, musician, producer and sound-artist. He is best known for his work in electronic and contemporary music, free improvisation, and electro-acoustic music.

With several albums to his name his work has appeared in festivals and events in numerous countries, including CYNETart Festival, Festspielhaus Hellerau - Dresden, Artus Contemporary Arts Studio – Budapest, CRUCE Gallery – Madrid, Fylkingen – Stockholm, Relative (Cross) Hearings festival – Budapest, Festival Futura – Crest - Drôme, FACT Centre – Liverpool, Association Ryoanji – Ahun - Creuse, The Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale — Hanover - New Hampshire, Areté Gallery — Brooklyn - New York, UC San Diego – California - San Diego, Berner Münster – Bern, Fabbrica del Vapore – Milan, Grünewaldsalen – Svensk Musikvår — Stockholm, Splendor – Amsterdam, Logos Foundation – Ghent, Palacio de Bellas Artes – Mexico City, Műcsarnok Kunsthalle – Budapest, Spektrum – Berlin, Susikirtimai X – Vilnius, Festival del Bosque GERMINAL – Mexico City, ДОМ – Moscow, Oosterkerk – Amsterdam, KLANG ! – Montpellier, Nádor Terem – Budapest, Utzon Centre – Aalborg, Center for New Music – San Francisco, Västerås Konstmuseum – Västerås, Störung festival – Barcelona, BMIC Cutting Edge concert series at The Warehouse – London.

His music was among the selected works at the International Competition de Musique et d'Art Sonore Electroacoustiques de Bourges 2005, in the category oeuvre d'art sonore électroacoustique, while received an honorary mention in 2006 at the 7th International Electroacoustic Competition Musica Viva in Lisbon (the jury was constituted by Morton Subotnick (USA), François Bayle (France), and Miguel Azguime (Portugal).

 

He operates the Aural Terrains record label since 2007 where he has released part of his work until now, alongside releases by Kim Cascone, Franscisco López, Tomas Phillips, Dan Warburton, Szilárd Mezei, Michael Edwards, Wade Matthews, Dganit Elyakim, Edith Alonso, Luis Tabuenca, Jeff Gburek, Philippe Petit, Steve Noble, Milo Fine and David Ryan among others.

 

He has written music for musicians of the Hyperion Ensemble, the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, the Hermes Ensemble, the Nemø Ensemble, the Konus Saxophone Quartett, and the Shadanga Duo among others. Close collaborations with Tim Hodgkinson, Vincent Royer, Chris Cundy, Yoni Silver, Lori Freedman, Jason Alder, Julie Kjaer, Henriette Jensen, William Lang, Wilfrido Terrazas, Philippe Brunet, Wade Matthews, Ernesto Rodrigues, Ove Volquartz to name but a few.

Picture of Thanos Chrysakis

Presspectives

Darren Bergstein — The Squid's Ear — 10.04.18

How do you know you've got a substantial recording on your hands? When, like digging deeper into a mine that yields undiscovered veins of precious gems, further listening experiences reveal vast, heretofore richer textural sinew. Chrysakis's extensive catalog, working the miens of electroacoustic improvisation and experimental sound design, is well-established, but even those familiar with his work and that of his Aural Terrains imprint will find Equinox to be both a departure of sorts and that rare creature, a genuinely indescribable foray into category-adverse electronic music that has few parallels, and even fewer analogs, to artists either past or present.

What is integral to capturing the thrill of electronic-based composition and execution is a keen grasp of fundamental materials: knowing the capabilities of your gear, maintaining a clarity and depth of vision, letting your imagination run rampant, and, well, enjoying the hell out of realizing sounds, noises, events, and occurrences that have yet to brush up against either cochlea or temporal lobe. It's almost foolhardy to exact any kind of broad analysis of what Chrysakis has wrought here; sometimes it's simply best to just let his art flow over you. Those rich veins aching for discovery throughout Equinox spool across all manners of emotional and colorative bandwidth. Opening track "Geomancy", with its index of metals, trilling bell-chimes, and mysterious chambers of squeaked and stretched tones, manages to coax a hallucinatory atmosphere filled with both sepulchral dread and incantatory fancy. "Seagazers" holds a mirror up to some of the 1990s more coarse and elusive purveyors of similarly scoured noise, the aspect ratios of Fennesz and Vainio raging against the dying of the light. "Radar Horizon" charts a number of alien topographies that ring familiar but remain elusive, as tremorous bass pulses underscore a gathering of marauding insects intent on obscuring the stereo field — it's a bracing track that in microcosm highlights the superb manual dexterity Chrysakis employs, as myriad sounds crash together, blossom, and explode outward once again.

It's obvious that Chrysakis has a not only a fine ear for detail, but a distinct respect and love for electronic music's rich history, both the obvious & more obscure: a track like "Frozen Forest" seeks to resurrect and genetically fuse Clara Mondshine, Terry Riley, and Pierre Henry, a surplus of ever-replicating icy tones that establish a vivid riot of red. Chrysakis's gift for sonic turns-of-phrase is only matched by his way with titles: the hypnotic drone-gaze of "Homing Pigeon" is only partially eclipsed by the closing grey-flecked digital hum and nuanced, post-Eno fibrillations of "Vermilion Zone". It's all utterly captivating, gripping stuff, a near-masterpiece of unbridled invention that virtually mandates you return to again and again.

 

 

Squidco staff pick — 12.02.1018

A remarkable album of electronic composition from sound experimenter and improviser Thanos Chrysakis, ten stunning compositions that explore a diverse set of tones across a broad spectrum of rich deep timbre and beautiful high frequency ringing, bell-tones at times taking the focus, at others providing a rotating basis for ethereal experiments; sophisticated and engaging!
 

Tone Shift — 20.04.2018

Belarus-based Greek composer and installation artist Thanos Chrysakis releases his tenth solo record, Equinox (Aural Terrains). The ten neatly, distinct tracks incorporate vinyl hiss, lagoon waves, and other frequencies as presented on Kermes Vermilio. The mood is a bit mysterious, like a curious search expedition of sorts. It’s offbeat with scoping synths that suddenly come to life on the treble-filled Prisca Sapientia that meanders and uses minimal effects persuasively. It’s also the longest and strongest piece here, in experiments that utilize high-pitch and low patter to contradict each other for a weird balance of atonality. Then we move into Mirrors upon Dunes with wavering, woozy mannerisms and awkward silent breaks, as if something is being tested and the tinkerer is patiently waiting on results.

Undercurrent Confluence has a fiery feel, with some cool distant congas and blended sci-fi attitude. I like the way the low-end rumbles and gurgles, and how efficaciouslyfeedback is incorporated. The wind-up toy environment, with its tinkling, fuzzy keys onFrozen Forest sounds like a chunk ripped from the fuselage of the lifeclocks in the 70s classic Logan’s Run. The final two short pieces are fairly quiet, like test tones, they continue to operate with a mission not unlike a Homing Pigeon would. The track just floats but doesn’t soar, it’s electrostatic with minor changes throughout. Equinox is one of those records that has its highs and lows in terms of acquired taste, it also is likely one that requires multiple listens in order to get the central scope and shape of what’s to come.

 

Jan Faix — His Voice Magazine — 29.01.2018

[ Czech ]

Hudební experimentátor Thanos Chrysakis má rád improvizaci a elektro-akustickou zvukovou abstrakci. To můžeme sledovat na jeho tvorbě, uměleckých kooperacích i na dramaturgii jeho labelu Aural Terrains. Na něm si občas vydává také své sólové počiny a tyto patří v jeho katalogu možná k nejzáhadnějším. Pod abstraktními pojmy v titulech se v bookletu nachází minimum informací o použitých metodách a nástrojích a je těžké je vyčíst i z nahrávek samotných. Shodnout se lze pouze na tom, že zde byl používán počítač ke zpracování těžko představitelné šíře zvukových zdrojů, rozhodně zde ale budou hrát výraznější roli terénní nahrávky různých prostředí, jejich sampling a processing, přítomnost syntezátorů je při možnostech těchto postupů již nejistá. Chrysakis se uvádí pouze jako autor, který si také vše zmixoval a zmasteroval. Jeho předešlý sólový počinΕΚΝΗΨΙΣ pro HIS Voice recenzoval Tomáš Procházka zde.

Třičtvrtěhodinové album nazvané Equinox (rovnodennost), s vytrácejícími se posledními písmeny, obsahuje deset abstraktně elektronických kompozic postavených na zvukově šťavnatých digitálních procesech, v nichž pravidelnější rytmus udávají pouze některé repetitivně pulzující efekty nebo samplové struktury. Mnoho skladeb, již od úvodní Geomancy, se soustředí na zkoumání zvuků zvonivých. Zřejmě se zde stavějí do souhry nahrávky zvonů reálných se syntetickými a případně třeba i s jinými zdroji ovšem prohnanými přes nějaký pěkně zvonivý ring modulátor. Chrysakis má svou vytříbenou estetiku, v jeho dílech se do tohoto dění umějí příjemně zapojit zapojit i nečekaně dlouhé průběhy znějící jako sytý syntezátor i manipulace s jakýmisi sborovými kousky.

Mimochodem na fyzickém CD jsou tu velice dobře zvolené i pauzy mezi skladbami. Plnokrevná hudba zde má možnost dlouho doznívat do ticha, třeba se pak ještě po chvilce připomenout nějakým posledním delayem a pak nám kousek úplného prázdna správně citlivě připraví odstup od minulosti a odvahu čelit většinou ostrému vpádu dalšího tracku, nálady tu navazující, tu kontrastní.

Dojde tu místy i na originální dronové vrsvení, jako ve čtvrtém kusu Radar Horizon, v němž se ve finále zjeví i rozkrájený lidský dech i občasné hlasové zajíknutí. Přijít mohou i trošičku noisové vrcholky, ale nejčastěji se tu navozuje spíše takové poslechově příjemné čisté laboratorní prostředí. A experimenty se v něm zjevně děly. Jejich zvukovou dokumentaci doporučuji všem prostudovat.

[ ENG ]

Music experimenter Thanos Chrysakis likes improvisation and electro-acoustic sound abstraction. We can see this on his work, art co-operation and the dramaturgy of his Aural Terrains label. Sometimes he also makes his own solo productions, and these are perhaps the most seductive in his catalogue. Under the abstract concepts in titles, the booklet contains a minimum of information on the methods and tools used, and it is hard to read them from the recordings themselves. It can only be agreed that a computer was used here to process a hardly imaginable range of sound sources, but it will definitely play a more prominent role in field recording of different environments, their sampling and processing, and the presence of synthesizers is already uncertain in the possibilities of these procedures. Chrysakis is mentioned only as composer, who has also mixed and mastered everything.

The album titled Equinox (equinox), with the last few letters degrading, contains ten abstract electronic compositions based on sonic digital processes, in which more regular rhythms indicate only some repetitive pulsating effects or sampling structures. Many pieces, from the introductory Geomancy, focus on exploring the sounds of bells. They seem to be staging here in the recording of bells of real and synthetical bells, and maybe with other sources, though, they are crouched through some pretty ringing ring modulator. Chrysakis has a sophisticated aesthetics, and in his works, he is well versed in engaging in unexpectedly long sequences, sounding like a rich synthesizer and manipulating some choral pieces.

By the way, on the physical CD there are also very well chosen pauses between songs. Full-blooded music here has the ability to long for silence, perhaps after a while, with a last delay, and then a bit of a complete void rightly sensitively sets off the distance from the past and the courage to confront most of the sharp invasion of the next track, the mood that follows, the contrast.

There will also be some original drones, as in the fourth piece of Radar Horizon, in which the final show will reveal a shed human breath and an ccasional voice chuck. There may even be a few noose peaks, but most often there is a rather lively, clean laboratory environment. And the experiments apparently happened there. I recommend their sound documentation to all of them.

Peter Vercauteren — Gonzo Magazine — 07.01.2020

Deze productieve Griekse componist en improvisatieliefhebber lanceert (tegenwoordig vanuit Wit-Rusland) zijn werk vooral via de digitale wereld en zijn eigen label Aural Terrains.

Zijn composities zijn veelgelaagd en verraden een breed interessespectrum: zowel zuivere elektronische geluiden, akoestische instrumenten, donkere dronescapes als bewerkte veldopnames komen aan bod. Niet zelden allemaal tegelijk, dus het gaat er bij momenten behoorlijk druk aan toe op deze boeiende cd.

Dat beseft Chrysakis blijkbaar ook, want hij last op tijd een stond zelf een stille (of pure stilte) rustpassage in. ‘Mirrors Upon Dunes’ krijgt zelfs een ritueel aura door het afwisselen van semi-stiltes met bewerkte belklanken. We kunnen ons vergissen, en deze componist geeft zelden al zijn keukengeheimen prijs, maar we menen op ‘Equinox’ opvallend veel bellen te horen, net als een bewerkte menselijke stem.

We herkennen de invloed van Iannis Xenakis in de hardere stukken, en wanneer alles samenkomt denken we ook aan recentere exponenten als Lionel Marchetti. Moeilijke muziek voor moeilijke mensen dus, die tijdens de abstracte momenten maximaal een beroep doet op het concentratievermogen van de luisteraar. Maar omdat Chrysakis even graag met herhalingsstructuren speelt, zijn tracks als ‘Radar Horizon’ of het pulserende ‘Homing Pigeon’ evengoed geschikt voor industrieel geschoolde oren.