Athens born, London based artist Spyros Polychronopoulos has always maintained an interest in the sounds fugitive nature. With Live Electronic Music he realises his most dynamic project yet. Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s texts on Aura he has created a series of works that now culminate in this exquisite sound object. Live Electronic Music, is the final release reflecting on Benjamin’s provocations. Joining with collaborator Fotis Kontomichos, Polychronopoulos sets out to challenge the aura of the pre-recorded music.

Live Electronic Music is a stand alone, iterative composition housed in a bespoke hand crafted polycarbonate box. This artist multiple is the first of its kind, utilising a specially designed software by Polychronopoulos with the help and ideas of Fotis Kontomichos. It is a universe, collected and housed in a tiny yet endlessly deep object. Each ‘playback’ is different to the one before it. The piece reveals itself endlessly, exposing new dimensions and dynamics drawn from a table of acoustic elements.

Essentially then, no matter how many times this piece plays, no two versions can ever be identical. This is a piece exploring evolution and iteration. A chance to experience and re-experience a sound world that is living and shifting moment to moment, no matter how subtle those shifts might be.

From Spyros:

This album consists of four musical pieces. The music that you are going to listen is not prefabricated or stored in the device memory and every playback is unique. Five independent audio channels are processed, mixed and reproduced in real-time. A different sample is loaded on each channel, chosen randomly from a sample database. Additionally, each channel introduces a different filter featuring unique parameters. The parameters’ values are varying constantly between two points, resulting in a fluid development of the layers across one another in time.

I came to LEM through a discussion on the capabilities and limitations of live electronic music performance with my friend Fotis Kontomichos. In contrast to music performed by instruments, electronic music consists mainly of prerecorded or generated samples synchronized with specialized software. So, the audience in a gig is exposed basically in pure auditory stimuli. Following on from that idea, we thought that we could create a software supporting the dynamic evolution of a varying composition performed live, without the artist’s presence. So, LEM was born out of this simple idea.


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