Alexandros Spyrou & Carlos Teixeira- intra
About: Alexandros Spyrou is a Greek composer, academic, and artistic director. His music has been performed across Europe and America by ensembles including Klangforum Wien, London Sinfonietta, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Recherche, Neue Vocalsolisten, MDI Ensemble, Ensemble SurPlus, Trio f : t, Reactive Ensemble, Longleash Trio, Contemporary Directions Ensemble, ensemble mise-en, Ensemble Airborne Extended, Musica Nova, Ensemble DissonArt, and many soloists. He has presented his music in festivals such as Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, and Internationales Digitalkunst Festival in Germany, Ticino Musica Festival, the Overdrive Festival, the mise-en festival in the USA, Festival Expresiones Contemporáneas in Mexico, Atemporanea Festival in Argentina, MUSICON series in the UK, Bilgi New Music Festival in Turkey, Piano Festival at Niarchos Cultural Center in Greece. He taught composition in universities in the UK, and the USA and currently serves as Dean of the College of Music at Sharjah Performing Arts Academy.
Piece: intra- is part of Liquid Identities, a cycle of works for soloists and audio(visual) media that explore the notion of liquid identity through compositional, performative, and contextual means. Each piece in the cycle investigates fluidity as a state of becoming—an unstable and mutable condition in which music, performer, and medium continuously question one another. The main idea of intra- is inward spiraling: a process of movement toward an interior state that resists linear progression and teleological endpoint. Rather than tracing a narrative path, the work unfolds as a constellation of gestural fragments which refract, and dissolve. Musical materials emerge, remorph, and dissipate suggesting a continuous folding-in rather than a forward motion. The flutist acts as a performer–processor, triggering live electronic processing in real time; processes such as frequency and pitch shifting, granular synthesis, stochastic freezing, and formant distortion are used to augment and demorph the musical material and the timral identity of the instrument. Through this interaction between performer and system, intra- becomes an exploration of permeability between human gesture and algorithmic processing, sound and self, interiority and resonance. What emerges is not a dialectic between two entities, but a continuous morphing field — a sonic organism in flux, spiraling endlessly towards its own elusive centre