On Yannis Kyriakides and Andy Moor’s Pavilion, the musicians are also the exhibitBill Meyeron June 5, 2020 at 8:37 pm

Cypriot composer and electronic musician Yannis Kyriakides uses polyphonic vocal arrangements, string sections, glitchy beats, and found-sound collages to articulate wordless experiences and evoke things lost or removed. English electric guitarist Andy Moor is best known for playing with the Ex, a band that has never abandoned the principles or ferocity of its punk roots, but whose music can’t be contained within any known genre. He also works in free-form settings, not just with Kyriakides but also with the likes of Ken Vandermark and John Butcher. As a duo, Kyriakides and Moor have often used broken shards of Portuguese and Greek folk songs as starting points for freewheeling improvisations, but on Pavilion, they’ve edited their extemporaneous playing into a set of compositions. In 2017, as part of the 57th Venice Art Biennale, they took up residence in the Studio Venezia, an oddly shaped environment in the French pavilion that contained fanciful sculptures of instruments and some high-end studio gear. They played for three days while art patrons came and went, and ultimately compiled nine hours of recordings–which they cut down to this album-length collection. The music they produced is much more jagged than the clean lines of the room in which they made it, but it nonetheless feels like it was sculpted to emphasize textures and shapes, instead of the melodies that define the duo’s other work. v

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