Basil Athanasiadis — Stray Cat's Dream

Basil Athanasiadis is a Greek pianist and composer of modern classical music.  His use of silence, stripped down instrumentation and nightmarish tension is similar to 20th century atonalists like Schoenberg, Ligeti, and Boulez.  This disk "Stray Cat's Dream" contains a number of his pieces, many of which have several sections, resulting in 17 total tracks.

True to the idiom of unsettling avant garde chamber music, Basil's "Book of Dreams" is 9 short movements (totally roughly 18 minutes of music) featuring complex, rhythmically unpredictable interplay between flute and prepared piano.  Intense yet controlled scalar disseminations and forboding vibrato long tones often emerge with sudden and fierce volume, to be followed by uncomfortably long intervals of quietude.

Yes, this music has a certain threatening coldness, a 'bad dream' sense of dread and strangeness, and those who have dismissed Schoenberg's work as somehow meaningless or valueless would admittedly best steer clear of this music as well.  In the case of Schoenberg, a part of me agrees with them: austerity is best balanced with some kind of legible expression, and attempts to create 'pure' new musical languages with no trace of the past can simply result in incomprensible or pleasureless patterns.

Athanasiadis is closer to Ligeti or Berg, perhaps, in that drama and romanticism are intact within his music.  He is not afraid to let a melody shine through, or to write the classic lament, the lonely soliloquy for violin, as he does with "Shinobu Koi", the track following "Book of Dreams".  In fact, later in the album he abandons dissonance completely at several points, the luminous arpeggiated cascade of title track "Stray Cat's Dream" full of warmly resonating major intervals.

His music has the visceral intensity of lying alone in blackness and truly facing your thoughts.  While many of his pieces dwell on uneasy or unresolved chords, his sound reflects a calming aspect of solitude as well, never over-dense or hurried, a naked, unguarded emotional expression from a person who has known the pleasure of time on his hands, and enough piece of mind to focus on the deeper subleties of harmony.

Dark, unfriendly multimovement pieces like "Little Songs of the Geisha" appear amongst the lighter numbers.  This one in particular owes a lot to works like "Pierrot Lunaire", featuring a female vocalist utilizing the characteristic speak-singing style, often strangely comical with its bizarre enunciations and drooping pitches.  The effect of a tightly controlled operatic vocal tone put to such illogical and strange music is surreal.  Each phrase is synced tightly with meandering odd-metered fragments of melodic phrases, dissipating and re-appearing in swells, never quite solidifying into identifiable structure.  Like the aforementioned "Pierrot Lunaire" or Anton Webern's pieces, I could listen to this 10 times and still scarcely be able to remember a sound from it, such is its disjointed character.  It's difficult to form an opinion about this style of music.

The 4th and final movement of "...Geisha" is much longer than the first 3, and different in style as well, a flowing and melancholic drift, much closer to drone than the others, revolving around a mournful chord, a dejected sense of pain which feels more funereal than anything akin to the clinical austerity of Boulez.  "Youki" is a very quiet and subtle piece for solo piano.  It is apparent to me the care with which these disconnected shapes were conceived.  The curiously abbreviated phrases reverberate into the backdrop, creating a sort of sophisticated ambiguity with their implied relations to the many others.

Though the album has quite a bit of piano playing, and Athanasiadis plays piano, he does not play the piano on the album, or indeed any instrument, choosing to compose and produce only.  His production is perfect, intimate and glowing with just the perfect amount of acoustic resonance.  The packaging is truly amazing as well, with a curious origami-like shape unfolding to reveal the CD, which actually manages not to be overly confusing or fragile, as well!  The liner notes are extensive, explaining in detail various philsophical zen concepts and the meanings behind the pieces, providing also the traditional Japanese texts used in "...Geisha".  In general, it's clear he's quite taken with Japanese culture, the title "Shinobu Koi" also referring to a haiku, which is provided in the liner notes, et cetera.

I thought this album was wonderful.  It has many of the most interesting and otherworldly aspects of 20th century atonal compositions, but a lot more variety and emotive relatability.  This disk is a very well considered 75 minutes of Athanasiadis' music, as the styles of the pieces compliment each other in such a way as to make the whole more than the sum of its parts.