Electronic Frequencies

The edition includes 37 works and has a total duration of 6 hours. With the multitude of participating composers and the wide range of approaches to this musical field, captures the dynamics and richness of contemporary electroacoustic music creation by composers who come from or live in Greece.

01. Vasilis Roupas – Vibrating Palm. (2023). 14.20.
02. Vassilios Kokkas – Full Moon Morning Watch. (2022). 4.17.
03. Phivos-Angelos – Cosmodemonia. (2022). 10:51.
04. Aki Pasoulas  – Wetlands. (2021). 10:05.
05. Maria Tsiantoula – Virtue as Sacrifice. (2019). 9.51.
06. Maria Pelekanou – Time is Up. (2022). 9.37.

In order of appearence:

Vibrating Palm. (2023) Vasilis Roupas fixed media: 2 channels duration: 14.20.

A piece from Takeshi Fumimota’s album ‘Adjuster’ (2023). Vibrating Palm (or Death Touch) is a ninja technique which supposedly causes delayed death to the victim. Fumimota is a character from the book “Vineland” by Thomas Pynchon. This is a minimal, lofi electronic piece inspired by Robert Fripp’s Frippertronics. Vasilis Roupas. Founding member of HELMCA with a continuous presence and participation in festivals and concerts in the last 25 years.
He has been a member of the Music, Sound & Performance Group at Leeds Beckett University (Leeds, England, UK), where he is a Professor in Composition.

Full Moon Morning Watch. (Jan 18, 2022) Vassilios Kokkas fixed media: 2 channels duration: 4.17.

A free improvisation, performed after days of research and patching on a modular system. Vassilios Kokkas (1965), Greek German composer of electroacoustic and instrumental works, installations, film music, musical experimentalist, educator and engineer. Composition studies in Athens and Berlin. Founding member of ÅÓÓÇÌ | HELMCA and The Orchestra Of The Sea.

Cosmodemonia. (2022) Phivos-Angelos Kollias fixed media: 8 channels duration: 10.51.

You are invited to participate with your senses, driven by your active listening – a state of mind between a passing moment of a rudimental everyday situation and a timeless, spaceless existence in the cosmos. Á kitchen of a busy restaurant. Walking in a large parking lot. A summer morning waiting at the bus station. Floating between planetary satellites. Experiencing a gravityless stasis in outer space. A fearless movement towards a burning star with the speed of light . All sound is created through an ‘intelligent’ instrument, Ephemeron, an adaptive non-linear feedback network. Different actions-gestures interact with Ephemeron, reacting dynamically by analysing sounds’ perceptual features. Premiered at the Australasian Computer Music Conference 2022 (New Zealand). Phivos-Angelos Kollias, integrates emerging technologies and sonic narratives to examine the interplay between the human experience and its digital counterparts. He has a PhD in interactive music from the University of Paris 8. Kollias has studied classical music in Cambridge, London and Paris and currently lives in Berlin. Kollias has received 9 awards and 9 nominations in international competitions, including the Excellence in Sound Design Award at the Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories Competition, Toronto, and one of the Musicworks Electronic Music Competition prizes. The group projects he has participated in have won 12 awards and distinctions, including the Apple TV Game of the Year award and the Gamescom Indie Award and listed twice in Forbes’ top lists.

Wetlands. (2021) Aki Pasoulas fixed media: 8 channels duration: 10.05.

Wetlands are transition zones between dry land and aquatic environments. Urban wetlands may add anthropogenic pressure because of the proximity of human activity to the natural ecosystems. This composition explores a dialogue between sounds living, moving and interacting in those spaces, creating also tension and release moments when these meet with human?made noise and activity. All sounds live in a cooperative coexistence, even during the most intense moments in this sonic world. The composition is based on field recordings of urban wetlands around the city of Valdivia in Chile, and was commissioned by the SoundLapse research team. Wetlands is published (2021) by the label Gruenrekorder. Aki Pasoulas is an electroacoustic composer, Reader and the Director of MAAST (Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre) at the University of Kent. He is the Principal Investigator of the research project ‘Sonic Palimpsest’, which explores our experience of heritage sites through sound; and the Co?Investigator of the project ‘Liminal Spaces’ seeking to interrogate the concept of remote or desolate places by revealing hidden voices and activities that occur within them. His research interests include acousmatic music, time perception in relation to music and sound, psychoacoustics, spatial sound and soundscape ecology. His scholarly and music works are published by KPM/EMI, ICMA, Sonos Localia, Stolen Mirror, Gruenrekorder, HELMCA, Pinpoint Scotland, Cambridge and Oxford University Press.

Virtue as Sacrifice. (2019) Maria Tsiantoula fixed media: 2 channels duration: 09.51.

Virtue as Sacrifice is a work for female voice, live electronics and tape. The construction of the material and its structure are based on characteristics of ancient Greek tragedy such as drama, theatrical speech and mystical style which coexist in a modern musical context. The text on which the work is based is Aristotle’s ‘Hymn to Virtue’. The treatment of the text is largely abstract, with some words and/or phrases being used as they are in the work, while others are used purely abstractly. Regarding the relationship between voice and electronics, the aim was to create a dialogue between them where the electronics would create a sense of dance, as in ancient tragedy. Maria Tsiantoula was born in 2000 in Larissa. She is a graduate of the Department of Music Studies of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in the composition department of the class of Professor Dimitris Papageorgiou. He holds a degree in Harmony with Distinction (Municipal Conservatory of Larissa, class of Antonis Daraklitsa), a degree in Counterpoint with Distinction (Thessalian Music School, class of Vasilis Liolios) and a diploma in Byzantine Music with Distinction (Contemporary Conservatory of Larissa, class of Konstantinos Koutsioulis) while she continues her studies in Fugue (Thessalian Music School, class of Kostas Salagas) and in Composition (Municipal Conservatory of Thermi Thessalonikis, class of Dimitris Bakas.

Time is Up. (2022) Maria Pelekanou fixed media: 8 channels duration: 9.37.

Countless shapes populate our visible and invisible world. Among the forms that appeal most to the mind is the spiral. The single, double or multiple spiral in two or more dimensions is found everywhere in the universe, e.g. in the eddies of rivers or gases, in the tendrils of plants, in DNA, in accelerated radiation, in whirlwinds and galaxies. For this work, the shape of the simple spiral was studied in depth in two dimensions. The sounds that make it up are mechanical sounds taken from recordings and electronic sounds synthesized in the sonic pi program. Maria Pelekanou lives in Bremen, Germany and works as a sound artist and composer for interdisciplinary projects. She combines electronics, electroacoustics and 3D sound technology with visual elements in live performances to penetrate deeply into the physical and emotional essence of sound and space. Since childhood, music has accompanied Maria throughout her life. She grew up singing and playing piano in Thessaloniki. During her studies at the Department of Music Technology and Acoustics of the Mediterranean University of Crete, she gradually found her way as a creative composer. Her artistic research is based on immersive sound, listening and perception and is mainly influenced by the human voice for embodiment, human-machine interaction and acoustic ecology.

Production: Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers’Association. Editor: Nikolas Valsamakis. Date: January 2024. Catalogue number: HEM002.