"Greek composer Anastassis Philippakopoulos has been a member of the Wandelweiser composers collective since 2003. When examining post-Cage 21st-century classical music, there was a transition in compositional styles from decomposition to recomposition of the new tonal music deeply associated with each composer's individuality. Philippakopoulos' work is one of the most intense forms of this style: a unique blend of the icy, sharp edges of minimalism, the warm colors of modern romanticism, and the introspective depth of Zen.

​In Philippakopoulos' piano works, each tone is closely connected with the previous and the subsequent tones via long resonances, forming a simple yet poignant melody that contains a magnetic power to draw the listener's ears. The intensity of a single tone of his piano pieces often evokes a beautiful stone, organically formed over the course of a very long time. In fact, Philippakopoulos takes several months to a year to compose one short 2-4 minute piece.

On this album, Philippakopoulos' twelve solo piano pieces (composed from 2005-2018) are performed by a rising French composer/pianist Melaine Dalibert, who is known for a unique algorithmic compositional style as well as his interpretations of works by Giuliano D'Angiolini, Tom Johnson, Peter Garland, and many others. Here Dalibert realized the transient, meditative beauty of Philippakopoulos' piano works by inducing rich harmonics in the tranquil afterglows mysteriously tinged with shadows, brilliantly conveying the immense and profound world of Philippakopoulos' music narratively and poetically."-elsewhere

"Before you play two notes, learn how to play one note ... And don't play one note unless you've got a reason to play it. If this precious maxim offered by Mark Hollis applied to every musician, it should be all the more true for those who practice reduction as the only possible aesthetic, in the opposite direction to the experiential hypertrophy of the world.

In the context of the most radical minimalism, each sound cell has a specific weight above the average: that's why Anastassis Philippakopoulos' short scores enacted such a simple and powerful aura, where the natural resonance - the white space of the pentagram - has an equal value with respect to the notes, of which it collects and combines the shadows and dissolves them in the air.

The Elsewhere label run by Yuko Zama welcomes the Greek composer in its catalog not only for elective affinity - he too has been part of the Wandelweiser collective since 2003 - but also by virtue of the direct link with the already known Melaine Dalibert, featured here for the first time as a performer only. Two specular poetics, as can be understood since the first minutes listening to the 'piano pieces' dated from 2013 to 2018: they're also equal in their marine inspiration, the slow breaking of the undertow (" Ressac ") and the horizon cut in half by the sky, also shown in the photo collage on the cover.

Laying one's eyes on the vast flow of the waves, forgetting their sound and reimagining it from within: as for the unavoidable partiality of the framed image, the present moment of Philippakopoulos' music also implies that which is beyond its extremes, it has no enclosed beginning nor end in that it does not narrate, but only contemplates, and in said contemplation its meaning is fulfilled.

No doubt influenced by the common nationality, thoughts spontaneously return to the imperturbable sequence shots of the master Theo Angelopoulos, except that the composer's "gaze", forgetful of historical time as well as that streaming before us, seems to truly exist only in the fleeting instant in which the fingers of the pianist awaken it, in a parenthesis ideally detached from the troubled human events that have taken place over the millennia. But this should not mislead us in considering Philippakopoulos' practice as an absolute abstraction, an artifice hatched to conceal the feelingfrom which these pieces unfold: unequivocally they are, in fact, motifs of the soul comparable to those of Zbigniew Preisner, apt to give voice to the inexpressible through slender but vibrant musical figures, outlined just enough as to not make them completely impalpable.

After a path followed in single steps, strenuously limited to only one key at a time, by contrast the attack of the "Five Piano Pieces" (2005-2011) is perturbing and almost violent in its direct juxtaposition of low and high registers, sudden thrusts that evoke the sinister pace of Ligeti's "Wanted Music". So at last a latent romanticism makes its way and tends to characterize the five fragments with greater determination, infused with a sentiment sometimes tormented, sometimes subduedly melancholic; only the last piece settles once more in a colorless limbo, a pacification of oriental ancestry that in just two minutes brings the poetics of Philippakopoulos back to the territories of the post-Cagean avant-garde - a "return to order" which, however, does not cease to question the fragile balance between the temporal dimension, sound and silence.

The symbiotic identification of Melaine Dalibert, by nature in full familiarity with the aesthetics of the composers of quiet , leads us to the discovery of an author still little known but to whom the climate of contemporary music will not fail to give prestige in the years to such as. For its part, Elsewhere continues virtuously along the editorial line which, less than two years after its foundation, has already imposed it as a point of reference in the discographic scenario of an increasingly less elitist sector, originating from and being aimed at a sensitivity whose character is virtually universal."-Esoteros (2/12/2020)