Tracklist

1. Side of the Mountain (4:44)
2. Thin Dust (8:44)
3. Cottonstone (4:55)
4. A Ghost of Spring (15:03)
5. Empire Within an Empire (7:20)
6. Enaerios (7:44)
7. A Secret Lake/ A Million Voices (16:05)

Side of the Mountain (excerpt)

Thin Dust (excerpt)

A Ghost of Spring (excerpt)

The first piece, Side of the Mountain quotes a text by Lawrence Durrell from his 1957 book Bitter Lemons of Cyprus. There is a paragraph where he recalls visiting the mine and being struck by the unearthly atmosphere. He describes the mountain as being 'casually raped' by the mining industry that has settled there. Thin Dust is a piece with a seemingly nostalgic air, but an abrasive surface, touching on the early days of the mine when many women and children were tasked with collecting rocks on the open pit. Cottonstone, a translation of the ancient Greek word for asbestos 'vamvakopetra' is a more aggressive and noisy response to the mining practice, juxtaposing a field recording of the surrounding nature with a mechanical and menacing electronic soundscape made of processed drum machines. A Ghost of Spring imagines a springtime 'paniyiri,' a feast in the mountains of Troodos in the years before the second world war. Fragments of archival recordings of folk music from this period are sampled and played through modular synthesizers. Empire Within an Empire refers to the double nature of empire in a place like Amiandos. Not only was Cyprus under British colonial rule at the time, but the private international ownership of the mine throughout most of its existence made it a power unto itself. A large police station was built in the area to control the workers, where the policemen were paid extra to put down protest that occasionally broke out. The Pathé News sample at the beginning of the track refers to a 'Renos Kyriakides' (no direct relation) who was responsible for the bombing of the Amiandos police station, one of the first targets of the EOKA colonial uprising against the British in 1955. Enaerios refers to the 36km cable car that used to run from the mountains to the Limassol port where the asbestos was loaded onto ships. My grandfather used to go to a cafeteria near that now non-existent dock, to play backgammon and drink, listening to cassettes of 50s Greek singers like Trio Kitara who feature on the track. The last piece, A Secret Lake/ A Million Voices, alludes to the current state of the mine, where a regeneration project has been initiated to restore the soil in the area. The larger crater has been made into an artificial lake, but a smaller one in more inaccessible area of the mountain naturally fills with water in the winter and has been dubbed the 'secret lake', an open wound in the mountain that is slowly and steadily being healed by nature. The cost of this industry has been immense not only to human lives but also on the environment.

Acknowledgments

Text on Side of the Mountain from Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957). Piano sample on Thin Dust from the Liberty 78 record: Far Away from the Motherland by Georges Guetary. Ghost of Spring uses many short samples amongst others from the Folkways music compilation (1962), and the excellent 7 CD compilation of music from Cyprus by the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation. Empire Within an Empire uses a sample from a 1956 Pathé news clip. The voice sample from Enaerios is from Palia Laterna by Trio Kitara (1958). A Secret Lake/ A Million Voices is based on musical material composed for an installation performance Spectrum by theatre group Schweigman&.

All music created in Amsterdam 2020-2022 by Yannis Kyriakides. Design by Isabelle Vigier.

Biography

Yannis Kyriakides was born in Cyprus and has been living in the Netherlands since 1992. As a composer and sound artist he looks for ways of creating new forms and hybrids of media that problematize the act of listening and is often drawn to the relation between perception, emotion, language and how they define our experience of sound. In the last years his work has explored this concept through the use of systems of encoding information into sound, synthesizing voices and projecting text to music. Yannis has written over a hundred compositions, comprising mostly theatre, multimedia and electroacoustic works for chamber groups and large ensembles. Together with Andy Moor and Isabelle Vigier he founded the CD label for new electronic music Unsounds. He is a founding member of the ensemble MAZE, and teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague.
www.kyriakides.com