Anthony Pateras is a composer, pianist & electroacoustic musician active since the late 90s. Alongside writing concert works, he performs in electronic, improvised & experimental rock configurations, and composes soundtracks for cinema.
Performers of his music include the Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC, Toronto & Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, Brett Dean, International Contemporary Ensemble, Thomas Gould, Manuel Zurria, Golden Fur, Jess Aszodi & Silvia Tarozzi/Deborah Walker. Pateras’ commissions include INA-GRM (Paris), Radio France, Südwestrundfunk (Baden-Baden), Australian Chamber Orchestra (Sydney), ensemble]h[iatus (La Creuse), Muzzix (Lille), Lampo (Chicago), Sonoscopia (Porto), Kitchen Orchestra (Stavanger) & the Astra Chamber Music Society (Melbourne).
Recent major projects include the music for Yves Netzhammer’s feature film Reise der Schatten (Rotterdam Film Festival, Tiger Competition, 2024), Pyrocumulus for acousmonium & string duo (Festival Akousma, Paris, 2023), Grace/or/Echo for 15 mobile percussionists (Eklekto, Geneva, 2022), A Dread Of Voids (Festival Archipel, Geneva, 2021), Syncopes (Centro di Musica, Modena, 2020), Mécanique Céleste (A&F Architectes, Yverdons-Les-Bains, 2020) & Pseudacusis (Musica Sanae Festival: Naples, Sokołowsko, Berlin, 2019).
Pateras’ work has been recognized through the Michael Kieran Harvey Scholarship (2020), residencies at La Becque (2019), Akademie Schloss Solitude (2018) and Montalvo Arts Center (2010), fellowships from Creative Victoria (2018-19) & the Ian Potter Foundation (2007) & two nominations at the UNESCO Rostrum of Composers (2004, 2011). He is a joint recipient of the ZKM Giga-Hertz Produktionspreise (2017) and is a Sidney Myer Creative Fellow (2014).
Anthony has written numerous percussion pieces; his solos Hypnagogics & Mutant Theatre are widely performed, & ensemble works commissioned and/or performed by Sinfonieorchester Basel, Synergy, Speak, Percussion Group The Hague, Vanessa Tomlinson, Diego Espinosa & Third Coast Percussion/Timothy Munro. His most recent is the percussion/prepared piano quintet Chronotope, performed with Drumming Grupo de Percussão (Lisbon & Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2023) using manipulated fish recordings from the Fish BioAcoustics Lab at the University of Lisbon.
Since 2012, Pateras has worked on an ongoing cycle of solo/tape assemblies that blur recorded & performed sonic realities. He toured many of these across Australia & Europe in 2023 with his quintet A Dread Of Voids & the soloists Callum G’Froerer & Clara La Licata. Featured at the 2023 Perth Festival, Sacrum Profanum (Kraków, 2022) & Klangspuren (Schwaz, 2021), he has personally presented his music at over 75 international festivals.
In text and film, he adapted Sasha Soldatow & Christos Tsiolkas’ Jump Cuts with James Rushford (De Layer, 2018-2020), provided the soundtrack for The Man Who Disappeared by Sylvère Lotringer (Anthology Film Archives, 2015), and co-created Another Other, a re-imagining of Bergman’s Persona with Natasha Anderson, Sabina Maselli & Erkki Veltheim (Punctum/Chamber Made, 2014). He has also worked with directors Ben Hackworth & Pia Borg, his scores for their respective early shorts Martin Four & Footnote screening at Cannes (2001, 2004).
In visual art, Pateras was invited by LABOUR as soloist for the opening of The Garden of Earthly Delights at Martin-Gropuis-Bau (Berlin, 2019), the National Gallery of Lithuania to compose for the closing of The World According to Fluxus (Vilnius, 2015) & by Slave Pianos for ¡¡Emancipate the Dissonance!! at Lombard-Freid Fine Arts (New York, 1999). He has also performed at galleries such as Centre Pompidou (Paris), Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam), Foundaçao Serralves (Porto), Henie Onstad (Oslo) and La Musée d’Art Modern et Contemporain de Strasbourg.
Performing & recording in multiple bands such as Pateras/Baxter/Brown, PIVIXKI, Thymolphthalein, North Of North & Beta Erko, his current group is Sulla Lingua with Italian musicians Stefano Pilia (baritone guitar) & Riccardo La Foresta (drums). Other ongoing collaborations include violinist Erkki Veltheim, electro-acoustic musician Jérôme Noetinger, guitarist Stephen O’Malley & the composers Anthony Burr & Rohan Drape.
He has additionally worked with Chris Abrahams, eRikm, Valerio Tricoli (as Astral Colonels), Marco Fusinato (as Poletopra) & had improvised meetings with drummers Han Bennink (Melbourne Jazz Festival), Paul Lovens (Musica Genera, Szczecin), Lê Quan Ninh (Total Music Meeting, Berlin) & Steve Noble (London Contemporary Music Festival). Pateras’ tētēma project with vocalist Mike Patton headlined Mona Foma 2017, and he featured on pipe organ for Sunn O)))’s 2019 release Life Metal.
In 2023 he released four albums on Another Timbre (Sheffield), Shelter Press/La Becque (Paris/Vevey), Penultimate Press (Berlin/London) & Futura Resistenza (Brussels). Overall he has published over 45 releases on Tzadik (New York), Editions Mego (Vienna), Ipecac (San Francisco), Cave12 (Geneva) and from 2012-19 produced & edited the Immediata text/music project.
Founding & curating the Articulating Space concert series & festival (Melbourne, 2001-2006), and the Melbourne International Biennale Of Exploratory Music (2008), both were extensively recorded & broadcast by the ABC.
Pateras finished his Bachelor of Music at LaTrobe (1999), completing a Masters & PhD at Monash (2002, 2008). He has taught composition at the Victorian College of The Arts, Edith Cowan University & Sydney Conservatorium, and was composer-in-residence at ANAM in 2010. Additionally he has guest lectured at the Hague Conservatorium, CalArts, Northwestern & UCSD. Anthony’s postgraduate theses focused on nexuses of composition, improvisation & electronics, constituents which continue to renew and recombine in his current practice.