Yannis Kyriakides suffered strange dreams for a few months when lockdown began. Here with the work Hypnokaséta (UNSOUNDS 82U), he has attempted to score those dreams and re-encode them into something a string quartet could play. Quatuor Bozzini, those eminent chamber modernists, have stepped into filling that role.
For this particular realisation by the unusual and imaginative Cypriot composer, there’s also the chance-element of a live improvising fellow in the room, who plays pre-recorded cassettes and also instrument of their choice, hopefully inserted at random moments much like a trickster striking dancers with a balloon at a masked ball. That role falls to Andy Moor (with his guitar, natch) on today’s realisation. As readers of these pages may know, I personally love dreams and anything that strives to express these unknowable and unrepeatable phenomena of the human brain, and so welcome any efforts in this area, however partial their success or inconclusive the results may be. Although the title here may suggest something like “sleep learning” cassettes, as were proposed in the novel Brave New World (Aldous Huxley wasn’t so fixated on the method of using cassettes, as he was decrying the type of vapid thought-free culture embedded by mechanical rote-learning.), in fact it feels more like the cassettes have – in the manner of a schlocky 1980s sci-fi movie – somehow captured the essence of each dream, and made them repeatable.
Kyriakides is confident he has made his best efforts on that account, and even supplied very evocative texts to each of the six parts of this work, so that we can catch fragments of his dreamed narratives. Some tasty instances include ‘London is covered in mud’, ‘The reluctant hotel manager’ and ‘A harpsichord in a derelict palace’. As it turns out, the specific reference to a cassette comes from the theories of Daniel Dennett (a contemporary American philosopher), and I’ll let you discover the context for yourself when you buy a physical copy of this fine record. Although part of me might wish for more cassette and noise insertions (a tactic which reminds me of the later live incarnations of This Heat, where Trefor Goronwy supplied unpredictable elements from the mixing desk at the back of the venue), in fact the core of the work is classical chamber music of the avant-mode variety, and the challenges presented by the composition have been well met. Yannis Kyriakides had to find a way to translate his subjective and insubstantial visions into something concrete and replayable; Quatuor Bozzini had to work hard to realise these difficult compositions. They pulled it off, and the results are a set of mysterious and oddly moving episodes, creating delicious tensions as they hover between the ambiguous and the specific. Very good. From 10th June 2024.