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About the Artists
Presspectives

ΠΑΡΑΛΛΑΞΙΣ

Thanos Chrysakis, Wade Matthews, Dario Bernal-Villegas

Duration 48.25 | Released January 2011

Parállaxis was recorded in Madrid, April 2010.

Sound-synthesis + field recordings + percussion.

THANOS CHRYSAKIS
MaxMSP & Electronics

WADE MATTHEWS
Digital Synthesis & Field Recordings

DARIO BERNAL-VILLEGAS
Percussion

About the Artists

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

Advanced academic studies in composition helped French-born American musician Wade Matthews realize he was not interested in telling other people what or how to play. In 1989, he moved from New York to Madrid and became part of the international improv community. Drawing on his knowledge of electronic music, he approached the bass clarinet and alto flute as “acoustic synthesizers”, rethinking their sonic possibilities, phrasing, and relation to breath in a musical language based on real-time creation. When faster processors made laptop synthesis viable, Matthews returned to his first love, tweaking a virtual synthesizer to allow very rapid control of sound parameters for solo playing and dialog with others. In 2007, he founded INTERMEDIA 28 with photographer Adam Lubroth and guitarist Julio Camarena. There, he began to combine field recordings with electronic synthesis in a 2-computer setup that has since become his main instrument.

Picture of Wade Matthews

Darío Bernal-Villegas is a composer, improviser and drummer from Mexico City. Improvisation has been an essential part in his work as composer and performer. Many of his pieces deal with improvisation, as his aim is to create an intense, creative interaction between the performer and the score; in other words, creating the conditions for a more intense dialogue between the performer and the composer.As an improviser he has worked with musicians like Raúl Tudón, (Tambuco Percussion Group, México), Wade Matthews (USA, Spain) Thanos Chrysakis (Greece), Sebastian Lexer (Germany) Oli Mayne (UK), David Plans Casal (Spain) among others. Nowadays, he is working with the Mexican improvising collective Generación Espontánea and with the composer Tom Corona in his group “The Coming Burguers”.

Picture of Dario Bernal-Villegas

Presspectives

Dan Warburton, The WIRE, #331 (Sep 11)

There's a composerly sense of architectural forethought to Thanos Chrysakis's work as an improvisor (using Max/MSP) which blends remarkably well with the percussion of his regular playing partner Dario Bernal-Villegas and Wade Matthews's processed field recordings on the six spacious soundscapes of Parállaxis.

Brian Olewnick , The Squid's Ear, 25-7-2011

In his liner notes to this release, Wade Matthews offers a brief history of freely improvised music, especially as it relates to ideas in the visual arts, eventually centering on the notion of parallax, "the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer.", relating this both to musician and listener and the numerous angles from which one can both create and appreciate this are of music.

Well put if not entirely novel but the more immediate question is: does the music at hand have the richness and complex naturalness to afford such views and maintain interest? By and large, happily, yes. Chrysakis (laptop, electronics), Matthews (digital synthesis, field recordings) and Bernal-Villegas (percussion) construct six pieces that tingle the ears and convincingly render a fairly unique sonic world. The percussion really glues things together, Bernal-Villegas wielding a vast but generally light palette, usually forming a pervasive but subtle base through which the electronicists weave sparse but liquid patterns, recorded sounds seeming artificial and synthesized ones natural, sometimes pastoral with a dark edge, on other occasions cheerily industrial. It meanders here and there, yes, and sometimes gets a bit loopy and bloopy, but by disc's end, the trio has established itself as a moving, breathing force in space and when they let off a bit of steam in the final cut, when the control is willfully eased, it feels earned, the rattles, wheezes, foghorns and other detritus coalescing into one quite satisfying mass. Nice work.