Position by Spyros Polychronopoulos + Nikos Veliotis
A duo of Spyros Polychronopoulos and Nikos Veliotis are releasing an album together for no other than Australia’s finest Room40.
Their collaborative work has endured 25 years of overlapping events and places, random and not so random meetings.
It is a psycho-acoustically charged collaborative album – Nikos that has a highly individual language of his own through cello and Spyros who is an academical mind, working through resonant systems, perceptual boundaries and everything that falls behind.
Four compositions where field recordings, voice, cello and electronics blend together giving us so much variety of means through the operative strategies, compositional methods and improvisation that both of them have accessed from different, individual angles.
An ambience that has a steady flux between the tension and a mature, sure hand workings of both musicians.
Spyros Polychronopoulos and Nikos Veliotis first crossed paths almost twenty-five years ago. Since then, their trajectories have unfolded in parallel: shared festivals, overlapping scenes, and a long-standing mutual attention to each other’s work.
A collaboration was often discussed but never materialised. Now, with time, context, and intent finally aligned, Position marks the convergence of two practices that have matured independently, meeting at a point of quiet precision and shared focus.
The album explores resonance as a living condition rather than a fixed property. Sustained tones expose the body of the cello as an acoustic field in constant negotiation. As time unfolds, minute fluctuations bring certain frequencies forward while others recede.
What emerges is not linear development, but a shifting balance — a position formed through interference, proximity, and slow drift. The music listens closely to how small details reorganise perception, allowing depth to surface through patience rather than gesture.
Spyros Polychronopoulos brings into this collaboration his long-standing academic research in musical acoustics and psychoacoustics, with a particular focus on resonant systems and the perceptual thresholds through which sound is formed and experienced. Nikos Veliotis, in parallel, has developed over many years a highly personal language centred on the cello, extending the instrument into dense, restrained drone environments where bow pressure, harmonic instability, and physical endurance redefine its role.
Position emerges at the intersection of these two trajectories: an encounter between analytical listening and embodied performance, where resonance is approached simultaneously as a physical condition and a perceptual event.
Rather than illustrating concepts, the album allows them to unfold implicitly. Position does not seek resolution. It remains attentive to relation, alignment, and displacement — sound as it stands, and as it slowly repositions itself over time.
credits
releases June 19, 2026
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