Electronic musician (and, elsewhere, pianist) Thanos Chrysakis’ newest release is dominated by dense continuous textures that throng the sonic field. It’s an undeniably intense listening experience, with less breath and fewer blatant contrasts than some of his other solo work. Portrayed with absolute auditory limpidity, each particle tickles one’s ears like glass mosquitoes. Other sustained sonorities uncoil or melt and spill from within the crystalline swarms, settling at the base of the foreground.
The claustrophobic sense of space in this music compounds this impression of acute, overwhelming lustre. Where some composers avoid conveying spatial cues, or are constantly bending the imaginary dimensional architecture surrounding the listener, Chrysakis maintains a single and rather vivid aural space that feels like it’s only large enough to contain you and the sounds.
The atomic bent of the gestural language, the mix of synthetic with naturalistic sounds, and the emphasis on higher spectra invites comparison to Iannis Xenakis’ work La Legende D’Eer—but that doesn’t mean that Chrysakis’ music is particularly derivative. Instead, this album can be more accurately regarded as another extension of the lineage of grain-oriented composition trailblazed by Xenakis and continued by others like Curtis Roads, Tim Hecker, and Ikue Mori. Chrysakis’ succinct snowblind diversions occupy their own particular place in this canon.
Nick Storring is a Toronto-based composer, musician, and writer, and a contributing editor to Musicworks. His music has been presented and performed by the Esprit Orchestra, Eve Egoyan, Quatuor Bozzini, Beijing’s Musicacoustica Festival, and Vancouver New Music. An avid collaborator, Storring has composed for films by Terrance Odette, Ingrid Veninger and, in collaboration with Dafydd Hughes, for the National Film Board’s award-winning Web documentary High Rise: Universe Within (2015), directed by Katerina Cizek. He’s also scored productions by Litmus Theatre and MT Space, worked with celebrated choreographers Yvonne Ng, Marie Josée Chartier, Brandy Leary, and Deepti Gupta, and created music for “ambient gaming environment” Tentacle, which was mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2011. Storring’s writing has appeared in Exclaim!, The Wire, and AUX.tv. He also contributed liner notes to Alga Marghen’s reissue of the ’60s band Intersystems’ entire recorded output, as well as RVNG Intl.’s box of early psych trio Syrinx’s reissues and previously unreleased material Tumblers from the Vault.