The composer and sound artist Yannis Kyriakides has shown a remarkable talent in the past for placing geography and sentimentality within abstract music, but on his new Resorts & Ruins he makes the pinpoints the nostalgia while using specific sound sources to make the music even more unnameable.
Born in Cypus, Kyriakides studied with the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen and has had his work performed by musikFabrik and Icebreaker. Rebetika, his 2010 unsounds release with guitarist Andy Moor of Dutch punk band The Ex put a fantastic spin on Greek folk music.
With Resorts & Ruins he returns to his native land (at least in spirit — he has long been based in Amsterdam) for a sound collage rumination on travel and childhood memories. The disc is filled with washes of sound, Turkish pop music and vague spoken instructions, seeming to collide the parallel confusions of memory and being away from home.
The album opens with the first of three parts of "Covertures," built from blocks of noise, street recordings and simple commands (primarily "open" and "close") spoken by Ayelet Harpaz. It wavers somewhere between pleasant and unnerving, the sounds intriguing but still conjuring the feeling that there is something to be done. The "Covertures" pieces were created for the Dutch Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Bienniale, and are staggered here, giving the album a sort of itinerary.
"Covertures 1" moves seamlessly into "Varosha (Disco Debris)," at 30 minutes the longest track on the disc. Here Harpaz's commands get more complex, although no less clear in their broken syntax and electronic distortion. More soundbeds populate the piece, along with samples of old Turkish vinyls and bits of needle scratching. It's named for a Northern Cyprus resort town that was evacuated following a Turkish invasion in 1974 and has stood empty ever since. It is also, Kyriakides remembers in the liner notes, the location of his childhood vacations and earliest memories. The piece is a recreation for inflexible media of an installation piece where sound samples were triggered by listeners' movements around the room, which must have been all the more disorienting, although it serves quite well to confuse on disc as well.
The first two tracks on the CD are the strongest. "Covertures 2" and "Covertures 3" continue in formula, having sunk deeper into the mire. They are separated by the 21 minutes of "The One Hundred Words," a text piece and the least overtly musical track on the album. Based on a Cypriot couplet song form, it alternates between whispered fragments and a voice lifted from an old Cypriot record, and is a fine piece of collage somewhat reminiscent of Otomo Yoshihide's constructions in the final days of Ground Zero.
The disc comes packaged in a lovely Kodachrome tri-fold cardboard sleeve and includes a half dozen miniature picture postcards, reproductions of the odd things one sees while traveling that glorify nondescript buildings while ignoring the sea and the sky. It's a very particular emotional memory Kyriakides is chasing here, and he captures it beautifully.
Comments and Feedback:
| 
