Anthony Pateras

Australian composer

Anthony Peter Pateras (born 1979) 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.

Anthony Peter Pateras was born in 1979 and grew up in Melbourne. He received classical training on the piano. They released an extended play, I'm with Stupid, in May 1998, launched at the Punters Club, but they had disbanded by early 2001. 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."

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 (November–December 2001) at La Mama, Pateras worked with Jeremy Collings on the soundscape, which Kate Herbert of The Herald Sun reviewed, "[it] 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. 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. 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, The Sydney Morning Heralds critic Peter McCallum observed, "[it's] a rough sound world of spikes, thuds and wispy slides like black lines painted roughly on bare brick." It brought together two groups: Clocked Out (Nozomi Omote, Vanessa Tomlinson) from Brisbane and Speak Percussion (Nat Grant, Peter Neville, Matthias Schack Arnott, Eugene Ughetti) from Melbourne. Steven Hodgson of Australian Music Centre (AMC) reviewed the work's last part, Refractions (2008), "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 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 (2012), 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. 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. 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.

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 (April 2019). 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 (Poland) and NK Projekt, Berlin.

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 (as Astral Colonels), Pateras has also collaborated with eRikm, Stephen O'Malley, Anthony Burr and Robin Fox.

Pateras met Robin Fox at La Trobe University in the late 1990s, where Fox was archiving recordings. Their second collaborative album, Flux Compendium (March 2006), 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."

In 2002 David Brown and Sean Baxter were performing in an art collaborative, Western Grey. Their first album, Ataxia, appeared in June 2004. Cyclic Defrost reviewer, Bob Baker Fish observed that on the album, "the trio utilise a number of different techniques, yet repeatedly arrive at a similar minimal, almost silent location, which allows the individual sounds an additional emphasis or resonance." He elaborated:

cquote|What rapidly coalesced in our discussions was to form a group combining traditional acoustic instrumentation to explore expanded sound worlds with a conscientious collective listening dynamic, coherent compositional spontaneity and a total commitment to free improvisation. Peter Blamey wrote in RealTime in 2007, "what is most interesting about this music is the way small percussive events coalesce into streams and layers of sound moving at different speeds, each of these layers containing elements from all 3 players". In an interview about the album, Baxter stated, "these three very familiar acoustic instruments, each with traditionally unique sonic identities, have been approached by us in ways where their sounds become very unfamiliar." Sean Baxter died on 15 March 2020.

Pateras, on piano, keyboards and electronics, formed a Melbourne based experimental music duo, Pivixki (formatted as PIVIXKI), with Max Kohane on drums in 2009. They issued their debut self titled album in August of that year. The duo sent a sampler to Ipecac Recordings, which was founded by Mike Patton (of Faith No More) and Greg Werckman (ex DUH). Pateras caught up with Patton, when the latter visited Melbourne, they decided to perform together initially as Patton/Pivixki.

In 2013 Pateras, who was then based in Berlin, collaborated with Natasha Anderson, Sabina Maselli and Erkki Veltheim on a large scale audio visual work, Another Other, for the contemporary opera company, Chamber Made. It is response to Ingmar Bergman's film Persona (1966), He described how the four performers, "sit between two banks of seats, separated from the audience by semi transparent screens: there are also screens behind the seats and to one side." They released their first album Geocidal at the end of 2014. Danny Baraz of Janky Smooth felt it was, "nothing short of an abstract, conceptual masterpiece. There are no hooks here. This will receive no radio play – except, possibly from the least commercial, college radio stations." The second album by the group, Necroscape, appeared in April 2020, with Pop Matters Justin Vellucci declaring, "[it] is not a record of hits; instead, it unfolds in Bizarro chapters as a catalog of misses [they] flesh out some interesting sonic touches and have a grasp on ambiance, sure. But, sadly, the compliments have to end there." While the staff writer from Smells Like Infinite Sadness observed, "[it's] very much a challenging listen but its unique, crazy quilt mix of musical components should be just as engaging for any adventurous listener." The tētēma project performed live at the 2017 MONA FOMA festival, Hobart. Writing in The Guardian, Shaun Prescott assessed that "tētēma didn't enrapture with anthems or token festival rock gestures, they enraptured with mood, with surprises, and with evocations rarely felt by audiences not inclined to spend their Friday and Saturday evenings in stuffy basement, warehouse or gallery venues." Philip Clark from Grammophone writes "there's no particular aural distinction between his composed and improvised work." Music critic Peter Margasak notes "Improvisation plays a big role in much of the music, but it's almost always situated within a rigorous compositional conceit." In an interview with The Quietus Patrick Clarke, Pateras detailed his approach: