Program Note
The work is contrasting aural places of intimacy and enclosure with expansive spaces and propagates through their interaction. The title is borrowed from a painting by René Magritte, depicting two coffins seated in a mountainous landscape. The source materials for the work have been recorded with an 18 channel microphones arrange in a globe shape, encoded in Higher Order Ambisonics. The work was completed with the support of Musiques & Recherches at the Métamorhose d’Orphée studio during in the summer of 2024.
About the Composer
Nikos Stavropoulos (Athens, Greece, 1975) is a composer of predominantly acousmatic and mixed music. He read music at the University of Wales (Bangor, Wales, UK), where he studied composition with Andrew Lewis and completed a doctorate at the University of Sheffield (England, UK) under the supervision of Adrian Moore. His music is performed and broadcast regularly around the world and has been awarded internationally on several occasions. His practice is concerned with notions of tangibility and immersivity in acousmatic experiences and the articulation of acoustic space, in the pursuit of probable aural impossibilities. Since 2006, he has been a member of the Music, Sound & Performance Group at Leeds Beckett University (Leeds, England, UK), where he is a Professor in Composition and lectures on Electroacoustic Music. He is a founding member of the Echochroma New Music Research Group, a member of the British ElectroAcoustic Network (BEAN) and the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers Association (HELMCA).