Yannis Kyriakides

Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969 and in 1975 emigrated with his family to Britain. After travelling for a year with his violin in the near east, learning traditional music, he returned to England to study musicology at York University, later being drawn by the music of Louis Andriessen to move to The Netherlands, with whom he studied under at the Hague Conservatory.

As a composer and sound artist he strives to create new forms and hybrids of media, synthesizing disparate sound sources and exploring spatial and temporal experience. He has focused in the majority of his work on ways of combining traditional performance practices with digital media.
He has written over ninety compositions, of which recent large scale works include: memoryscape (35′) for video and ensemble (musikFabrik, WDR) ; satellites (50′) for ensemble and electronics (Seattle Chamber Players); disco debris (interactieve installatie, Amiens Maison de la Culture). an ocean of rain (80′) opened the Aldeburgh Music Festival in 2008. Two sound installations will be shown at the Dutch pavillion of the Venice Bienalle 2011.

He has been featured composer at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2007 and will be in November Music Festival 2011. He has released about 10 CDs of his music of which the most recent is “Antichamber”, a double CD collection of electroacoustic chamber music, which won a French Qwartz
electronic music award.

In September 2000 he won the Gaudeamus composition prize for his composition a conSPIracy cantata – regarded by The Wire magazine as “a modern classic in the making”. The CD “Wordless” recieved an honorary mention in the Prix Ars Electronica 2006. Together with Andy Moor and Isabelle Vigier he founded and runs the CD label for innovative new electronic music, Unsounds. He teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague.

http://www.kyriakides.com/