VITA MORGANA

Julian Cowley — THE WIRE — #507 — May 2026

Mexican flautist Wilfrido Terrazas performs Vita Morgana and five other characteristically stretching pieces by Greek composer Chrysakis. Three date from 2024; the others were written more than a decade earlier. Using bass and alto as well as standard flute, Terrazas rises brilliantly to the challenges of solo performance, sustaining concentration and shifting focus as required by the structural continuities of each piece, as well as by the subtly shaded, yet sometimes dramatically enacted articulation of details. Demands are also made upon the instruments themselves, extending their range of voicings, while also refreshing their characteristic sound and widening its expressive scope through unexpected twists and juxtapositions. As usual with Chrysakis's music, the listener's role is necessarily active, requiring an intensity of involvement that yields its own rewards in terms of receptive awareness.

Tyran Grillo — SEQUENZA21 — 31 January 2026

Vita Morgana is the latest album devoted to the work of Greek composer and producer Thanos Chrysakis, released on his own Aural Terrains imprint, a label name that already gestures toward topography, strata, and the slow intelligence of landscapes. The program gathers three earlier works alongside more recent compositions, most of them written for solo flutes in varied incarnations. Performed with unwavering focus and artistic integrity by Wilfrido Terrazas, this recording offers an experience that invites one to wander rather than to map. For listeners attuned to contemporary practices in which sound behaves as an ecology, Vita Morgana is essential.

The album opens with the paired works Eirmos I and Eirmos II, both composed in 2011, forming a diptych that functions as a root system from which the rest of the album quietly spreads. Eirmos I, for standard flute, is rich in extended techniques, yet nothing here announces itself as an effect in search of justification. Each sound feels embedded in a larger logic, arriving with the inevitability of growth rather than the arbitrariness of display. Melody persists throughout, not always as pitch but as latent direction. Even in moments when discernible notes dissolve, music remains present in the breath itself, carrying unrealized possibilities like seeds suspended in air. Whispering and humming introduce a fragile corporeality that softens the flute’s metallic spine, while harmonics and multiphonics open inward corridors, inviting the listener into layers beneath the audible surface.

Eirmos II, written for bass flute, deepens this descent. Its sonorous weight evokes a lineage that seems to pass through multiple instrumental ancestries at once, drawing on a wealth of overtones that feel ancient and uncategorized. Circular breathing sustains the sound, producing a sense of simultaneous tension and awe, as though time itself has been bent into a continuous loop. What distinguishes this piece most vividly is its capacity to summon vegetal forms. Tendrils of branches, vines, and leaves appear to proliferate in the mind, intertwining into dense networks that resist both repetition and resolution. These structures feel inevitable yet irreproducible, growing according to internal rules that no single hearing can fully grasp. There is a profound unease at work here, one that remains inseparable from beauty. Chrysakis offers a contradiction that does not seek reconciliation, a sonic koan that remains open, fertile, and unresolved.

The bass flute returns in doubled form in the 2012 title work, Vita Morgana, where the music acquires a hallucinatory density. Layers of sound hover and refract, creating an auditory phenomenon that envelops the listener rather than receding from approach. One is drawn inward, wandering through sonic chambers that feel both luminous and hostile, spaces that seduce even as they threaten erasure. Heat, distortion, and shimmer coexist, producing a dreamlike atmosphere that never becomes comforting. This is music that peers into the darker provinces of imagination, where desire and danger are no longer distinct territories but overlapping states of being.

The latter half of the album turns toward the present, beginning with Carved Continuum for alto flute, one of three works composed in 2024. The act of carving suggested by the title does not imply force or incision but accumulation and erosion. The music attends closely to infinitesimal changes, to grains of time and sound that gradually contour the whole. Listening becomes an exercise in microscopic awareness, as if the ear were tracing the slow rounding of form shaped by countless small pressures. There is a quiet luminosity here, a sense of something polished through patience rather than intention, awaiting recognition even as it drifts toward disappearance.

Night Ray, for flute, shifts the terrain once more. Its gestures suggest a song without words, emerging from a culture steeped in motion. The music communicates through posture and contour rather than syntax, offering a kind of prelinguistic intimacy. The program closes with Krama for bass flute, a work that seems to invert fractal logic and invite the listener inside it. Here, the recursive patterns that once unfolded at a distance become inhabitable. Sound wraps around the body, felt as much as heard. The music allows itself to be worn, unraveled, and finally released, its fragments carried away by an unseen current. What remains is a heightened awareness of continuity, of processes that persist beyond any single articulation.

Taken as a whole, Vita Morgana unfolds like a forest without a central clearing, its paths branching endlessly beneath the surface. Each piece functions as a node in a rhizomatic network, connected not by hierarchy but by shared subterranean impulses. The listener is not asked to follow but to inhabit, to become momentarily lost in the world’s own restless complexity. In this way, Chrysakis gestures toward a philosophy of listening that accepts uncertainty as generative, where meaning arises from ongoing transformation. The music disperses, continuing invisibly, like roots extending into dark soil, patterns repeating at scales too small or too vast to name.

Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg — Orynx — 29.03.2026

[FR]

Le compositeur – improvisateur – producteur de musiques contemporaines Thanos Chrysakis nous montre album après album l’étendue de son travail magnifiquement documenté sur son label Aural Terrains. Souvent ces productions rassemblent plusieurs compositeurs différents, dont certains « grand noms » avec un noyau d’interprètes instrumentistes avec des œuvres composées pour des ensembles et des solistes aux clarinettes basses ou contrebasses, trombones et tubas, guitare électriques… ou pour un seul soliste.

C’est cette option qui est retenue ici où sous le titre Vita Morgana défilent six compositions très remarquablement exécutées par le flûtiste mexicain Wilfrido Terrazas, un spécialiste des techniques créatives et étendues aux flûtes, ici : flûte, flûte alto et flûte basse. Les compositions de Thanos Chrysakis datent de 2011 : Eirmos I pour flûte (17’21’’), Eirmos II pour flûte basse (10’37’’), 2012 : Vita Morgana pour deux flûtes basses (7’40’’) et 2024, Carved Continuum pour flûte alto (8’30’’), Night Ray pour flûte (10’16’’) et Krama pour flûte basse (9’16’’).

Si Wilfrido Terrazas est un exceptionnel interprète de musique contemporaine d’avant-garde focalisée sur le sonore, son parcours artistique est profondément éclairé par les musiques de differents pays d’Amérique Latine, du free-jazz afro-américain et de l’improvisation européenne ainsi que les musiques pour flûtes d’Asie et des autres continents. Derrière lui, une solide carrière dans toute l’Amérique latine et aux États-Unis dont la ville de San Diego durant laquelle il a créé environ 400 premières mondiales et composé plus de 80 œuvres.

Comme les saxophonistes pullulent déjà dans l’univers de la free music, il m’est impossible de laisser de côté un flûtiste de cette envergure dont le travail se révèle vraiment fascinant. Surtout que Wilfrido Terrazas fait sienne la partition du compositeur et y injecte toute sa sensibilité, une technique confondante et sa personnalité musicale à part égale avec Thanos Chrysakis lui-même.

Ce qui me sidère est que tout du long de ces interprétations, il y a un questionnement par rapport au timbre, aux intervalles, à la qualité du souffle, au choix précis dans l’écheveau des possibilités des techniques alternatives d’un point de vue bien spécifique avec un maximum de cohérence esthétique.
Chapeau bas ! Non seulement le compositeur est excellent, mais aussi l’interprète en partage tout le crédit par la grâce de sa vision musicale. Un chef d’œuvre !

[ENG]

The composer, improviser, and producer of contemporary music, Thanos Chrysakis, showcases the breadth of his magnificently documented work, album after album, on his label Aural Terrains. Often, these productions bring together several different composers, including some "big names," with a core group of instrumentalists performing works composed for ensembles and soloists on bass or double bass clarinets, trombones and tubas, electric guitar… or for a single soloist.

It is this latter approach that is taken here, where, under the title Vita Morgana, six remarkably performed compositions unfold, all by the Mexican flautist Wilfrido Terrazas, a specialist in creative and expansive techniques on flutes—in this case, flute, alto flute, and bass flute. Thanos Chrysakis's compositions date from 2011: Eirmos I for flute (17'21"), Eirmos II for bass flute (10'37"), 2012: Vita Morgana for two bass flutes (7'40"), and 2024: Carved Continuum for alto flute (8'30"), Night Ray for flute (10'16"), and Krama for bass flute (9'16").

While Wilfrido Terrazas is an exceptional performer of contemporary avant-garde music focused on sound, his artistic journey is deeply influenced by the music of various Latin American countries, African-American free jazz, and European improvisation, as well as flute music from Asia and other continents. Behind him lies a solid career throughout Latin America and the United States, including in San Diego, where he created approximately 400 world premieres and composed over 80 works.

Given the already abundance of saxophonists in the free music scene, it's impossible for me to overlook a flautist of this caliber whose work is truly captivating.Especially since Wilfrido Terrazas makes the composer's score his own, infusing it with his own sensitivity, a dazzling technique, and a musical personality on par with Thanos Chrysakis himself.

What astounds me is that throughout these performances, there's a constant questioning of timbre, intervals, breath control, and the precise selection from the complex web of alternative techniques, all from a very specific perspective and with maximum aesthetic coherence. Hats off! Not only is the composer excellent, but the performer shares all the credit thanks to his musical vision. A masterpiece!