Dutch-Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides is better known for his extended multimedia and music-theatre works, but the ten pieces collected on this double-CD demonstrate that writing for smaller ensembles affords him equally fertile ground for creative exploration. The album offers listeners a unique opportunity to follow the composer’s rich field of inspirations and intentions as they have developed over the last thirteen years. Antichamber seems a fitting title, not because Kyriakides is antagonistic to chamber music, but more because of the formal tensions he creates between acoustic and electronic sources, between sound and space, and between scale and available forces. The pervasive use of technology—ranging from the obsolete (a vinyl record player in Zeimbekiko 1918 for violin, electric guitar, and soundtrack) to the most current (reworked live sound processing that manipulates Antichamber’s string quartet)—acts sometimes as a modifier, other times as a controller, or even as a performer itself. But what it does consistently is question the relational expectations of a genre known for its intimacy. As a result, each work on Antichamber pushes against the inherited limitations of a classical genre to arrive at greater sonic, emotional, and conceptual intensities.
