Anthony Pateras
Anthony Peter Pateras is an Australian-born composer, pianist and electronic musician. He has released several solo albums and collaborated with other artists. Pateras has performed and recorded in Australia, North America and Europe. At the APRA Music Awards' Art Music Awards, he has been nominated three times: 2011 for Performance of the Year for his composition, Refractions, performed by Clocked Out and Speak Percussion; 2012 for Work of the Year – Instrumental for Flesh and Ghost performed by Speak Percussion; and 2015 for Performance of the Year for Beauty Will Be Amnesiac or Will not Be at All performed by Synergy Percussion.
Early years
Anthony Peter Pateras was born in 1979 and grew up in Melbourne. He received classical training on the piano. His early band, Elemenopede, was formed in Melbourne in 1996 and played local venues including the Punters Club, Fitzroy. The line-up was Pateras on keyboards, Greg Craske on guitar, Luke Fitzgerald on drums, Dan Flynn on vocals and Mark Woodford on bass guitar. They released an extended play, I'm with Stupid, in May 1998, launched at the Punters Club, but they had disbanded by early 2001.Pateras started tertiary education at La Trobe University, studying composition with Graeme Leak, Neil Kelly and John McCaughey. In 2007 he completed his PhD at Monash University with Thomas Reiner. Pateras' thesis was, "Exploratory combinations of composition, improvisation and electronics based on relationships between form and timbre."
Solo work
1999 to 2008
As an undergraduate Pateras scored numerous theatrical productions at La Mama, The Carlton Courthouse, LaTrobe Student Theatre and Belvoir St Theatre. He was a sound composer for a play, Carboni, written by John Romeril and performed at the Carlton Courthouse in June 1999. For William 37 at La Mama, Pateras worked with Jeremy Collings on the soundscape, which Kate Herbert of The Herald Sun reviewed, " has some appropriate and interesting moments but is often too loud, intrusive and poorly placed."Between December 1999 and June 2001, he recorded Malfunction Studies, in Melbourne, New York and Copenhagen. Fellow musicians were Collings on cello, Elemenopede bandmate Fitzgerald on percussion, Justine Anderson as soprano, Jane Burnside on clarinet, Kathy Cameron as alto, Tom Chiu on violin, Matt Dowling on violin, Emily Hayes as mezzo-soprano, Luke Peyton on turntable and percussion, Helle Thun as soprano and Victorian College of the Arts' Percusion Ensemble on various percussion instruments. It was released as a CD album in 2002.
From 2001 till 2006 Pateras scored short films; two of which were accepted in the Cinéfondation section at the Cannes Film Festival: Ben Hackworth's Martin Four and Pia Borg's Footnote. He curated the Articulating Space concert series from 2001, which transformed into the Melbourne International Biennale of Exploratory Music, in 2008.
Pateras' early works include the percussion solo Mutant Theatre, written for Vanessa Tomlinson and premiered in March 2001 at the Melbourne Museum. Mutant Theatre was issued as his solo album via John Zorn's Tzadik Records in January 2004. It was rated by AllMusic's staff writer as three-and-a-half stars out-of five. Pateras composed the tracks, provided piano, prepared piano and vocals, and conducted the session musicians as well as co-producing the work.
"Chromatophore for 8 amplified strings" was composed for the inaugural Cybec Melbourne Symphony Orchestra 21st Century Composers' Program in 2003. The piece was selected as a Recommended Work at the International Rostrum of Composers in 2004, and in 2006 was performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Brett Dean. He toured with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in 2007, composing "Autophagy, for amplified string quintet, prepared piano and electronics." The Sydney Morning Heralds critic Peter McCallum observed, " a rough sound world of spikes, thuds and wispy slides like black lines painted roughly on bare brick." Both "Chromatophore for 8 amplified strings" and "Autophagy" appear on his solo album, Chromatophore. AllMusic's François Couture described the album, "there is no real theme, genre, form, or instrumentation running through the six works... except creativity and broad palette."
2009 to 2015
Pateras composed and conducted a performance, Percussion Portrait, at the Melbourne Recital Centre in 2009. It brought together two groups: Clocked Out from Brisbane and Speak Percussion from Melbourne. Steven Hodgson of Australian Music Centre reviewed the work's last part, Refractions, "highly sectionalised, progressing from texture to texture with a continued sense that pitch and rhythmic materials have been selected to serve the instrumental combination in use at any particular time." At the APRA Music Awards of 2011, Refractions, was nominated for an Art Music Award for Performance of the Year as delivered by Clocked Out and Speak Percussion.At the APRA Music Awards of 2012 Pateras was nominated for Art Music Award for Work of the Year – Instrumental for Flesh and Ghost, which was performed by Speak Percussion in September 2011. The judging panel described Flesh and Ghost, as "a wonderfully epic piece where the composer utilises the 12-player percussion ensemble beautifully, creating a one sound world and a lovely sense of texture. It has a sense of space with spectrums of sound."
Pateras provided the score for the psychological thriller film, Errors of the Human Body, directed by Eron Sheean and starring Michael Eklund, Karoline Herfurth, Tómas Lemarquis and Rik Mayall. The soundtrack album was released on Editions Mego. In that year he composed Ontetradecagon – his interpretation of jazz musician, Miles Davis' work. Pateras performed it live-in-the-studio for Andrew Ford's The Music Show on Radio National. RealTime journalist Chris Reid determined, " pays homage to the experimentalism of both Davis and Stockhausen by exploring the conjunction of jazz improvisation and experimental music." The piece featured the composer on a Revox B77 tape recorder placed in the centre of the concert hall, with AAO members spaced about in six groups.
Synergy Percussion commissioned an hour-long percussion sextet from Pateras, Beauty Will Be Amnesiac or Will not Be at All for their 40th anniversary in 2014. The celebratory piece was premiered at Carriageworks. The Sydney Morning Heralds music critic David Vance noted "As the sound sources migrate from skins to metal, wood, and glass, individually or in combination, so too does the experience of these changing sonorities." At the APRA Music Awards of 2015 he was nominated for Art Music Award: Performance of the Year for Beauty Will Be Amnesiac or Will not Be at All, as performed by Synergy Percussion.
2016 to current
In 2016 BBC Symphony Orchestra presented Pateras' composition Immediata at Maida Vale Studios under Brett Dean, with Thomas Gould as soloist and Pateras on a Revox tape recorder. That same year Toronto Symphony Orchestra performed his Fragile Absolute at Roy Thomson Hall, also conducted by Dean. Pateras was a Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart in 2018. While there he recorded pipe organ for the song, "Troubled Air", on SUNN O)))'s album, Life Metal.Pateras' concert work, Pseudacusis, was commissioned by the 2019 Musica Sanae project to explore relationships between sound and medicine. Musica Sanae is a collaboration of three European realities: Phonurgia, Naples, In Situ Foundation, Sokołowsko and NK Projekt, Berlin. Pseudacusis was performed in Naples, Sokołowsko, Kraków and Berlin. According to Pateras it was inspired by "auditory pareidolia, exploding head syndrome, otoacoustic emissions and psychoacoustics, in general." Pseudacusis, which was later issued as an album, is based on a live performance, on 27 September 2019, at the Sacrum Profanum Festival in Małopolska Garden of Arts, Kraków. Ben Harper of Boring Like a Drill reviewed the album, "By the latter half of the work, you’re wondering how much of the frenzied, stuttering percussion solos are happening in front of the audience and whether you hallucinated Pateras playing some cocktail lounge jazz rhapsody in amongst it all."
Collaborations
Pateras has collaborated with various musical artists. He worked in bands: North of North, tētēma, Thymolphthalein, PIVIXKI, Beta Erko and Pateras/Baxter/Brown. He has formed duos with: Erkki Veltheim, Valerio Tricoli, Jérôme Noetinger and Rohan Drape. Pateras has also collaborated with eRikm, Stephen O'Malley, Anthony Burr and Robin Fox.Duo with Robin Fox
Pateras met Robin Fox at La Trobe University in the late 1990s, where Fox was archiving recordings. Fox, an electro-acoustic improviser and composer, introduced Pateras to obscure Australian experimental music. In May 2003 Pateras and Fox released their duo album, Coagulate, via Synaesthesia Records. AllMusic's Couture opined, " is blatantly maximalist: loud, occasionally harsh, very in-your-face and occasionally quite entertaining."Their second collaborative album, Flux Compendium, had Couture observe, "the two electronicians toned down the harsh noise in favor of a more discreet – and intriguing – sound palette. It seems these two can build impromptu compositions out of any type of sound: breath, belches, coins, laughs, doors, and yes, even pure electronic tones."
End of Daze, his third album with Fox, followed in January 2007, which Couture felt was, "chock-full of exciting experimental music, and nicely sequenced into a fun yet challenging listen... Samples and glitches are digitally treated and combined on the fly to produce fast-paced pieces that stand somewhere between sound collage and digital noise music."