Biography

Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969 , emigrated to Britain 1975 and has been living in the Netherlands since 1992. He studied musicology at York University, and later composition with Louis Andriessen and Dick Raaijmakers. As a composer and sound artist he looks for ways of creating new forms and hybrids of media that problematize the act of listening. The question as to what music is actually communicating is a recurring theme in his work and he is often drawn to the relation between perception, emotion and language and how that defines our experience of sound. Yannis has written over a hundred compositions, comprising mostly of music theatre, multimedia and electroacoustic works for chamber groups and large ensembles. Together with Andy Moor and Isabelle Vigier he founded and runs the CD label for new electronic music Unsounds. He is a founding member of the ensemble Maze, and teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague. He currently lives is Amsterdam with his wife and two sons.