Since 1999, Quatuor Bozzini has been a unique voice championing new, experimental, and classical music. A driving force in Montreal's vibrant creative scene and beyond, the quartet cultivates an approach that embraces risk, experimentation, and collaboration, venturing off the beaten path. Through its rigorous standards of quality, it has contributed to the creation of a diverse repertoire that transcends trends and fads. Over the years, it has commissioned numerous works and premiered nearly 500. Its open, collaborative, and artist-led approach has resulted in many innovative and highly acclaimed productions, including interdisciplinary projects incorporating video, theatre, and dance.

1st part

Hypnokaséta

Composition: Yannis Kyriakides

On stage: Quatuor Bozzini, Andy Moor & Yannis Kyriakides

Hypnokaséta is a continuous set of 16 pieces for string quartet and electronics based on dreams that I had during the first few months of lockdown, April-June 2020. Accounts of these dreams are encoded in the music that is played by the quartet and also encrypted in the sound textures that surround this. The pieces alternate between quartet as the foreground and electronic interludes, where solos or duos underpin the soundscape. The name ’cassettes’ refers to a theory of dreams proposed by Daniel Dennett, that says that dreams are loaded into consciousness like a cassette tape, just before waking.

2nd part

Rebetika

Arrangements and Improvisations: Andy Moor & Yannis Kyrakides

Rebetika

Andy Moor (guitar) and Yannis Kyriakides (computer) lovingly deconstruct and reassemble their favorite rebetika music in a set of nine pieces that encompass a wide scope of musical vision. This is an unusual and original take on the so-called "blues" music of the Greek diaspora of the early 20th century. Composer Yannis Kyriakides and guitarist Andy Moor offer their own avant-garde take on this music over the course of the piece. The starting point for these songs is a series of scratchy old bouzouki recordings, which are then sampled and manipulated while real-time guitar is overlaid. This meeting of old musical styles, decrepit recordings and very modern string experiments results in an often very emotive blend, effectively re-writing the past with a combination of reverence and adventurous Tetuzi Akiyama-like musicianship, sounding like an angular, Eastern European Charley Patton on the especially haunting 'Minores’.