muted/blast is an ongoing concert/recording project that I planned in the Fall of 2017, with the assistance of Zesses Seglias and Dimitris Maronidis, and first realized in the Spring of 2018. The concept is simple: the project is centered around the performance and recording of several artistically and technically challenging piano works in collaboration with virtuoso Jana Luksts - the goal of which being to realize these works at a high level and then codify them via a high quality recording, as the future of such works, due to their difficulty, remains constantly in question. This was first undertaken by Luksts in Thessaloniki, performing/premiering works by myself (GP), Spyrou (WP), Seglias (GP), and Maronidis (WP), and subsequently 14 works by young composers at the Aristotle University, which were performed publicly outside of the University and recorded (Smiris, Katidou, Sakellaridis, Bikos, Gamotsos, Chatziioannou, Gkentzis, Kesmiris, Orfanidou, Emmanouilidou, Koutounidis, Marinakis, Chalampalaki).

The scope of the muted/blast concept has expanded drastically to a now global scale, but with its original goals in mind - to program and document artistically and technically challenging piano and chamber music repertoire. Thus far, we have recorded works by Seglias, Maronidis, Spyrou, Erber, and Finnissy, with more planned. We have, as meta.ξ, presented concerts in conjunction with Luksts in New York City and Toronto, featuring the works of Bakas, Chafta-Douka, Dimou, Gioti, Katehis, Lemi, Lillios, Maronidis, Seglias, Spyrou, and Xenakis - the majority of which were US/Canadian premieres, if not world premieres. In our NYC and Toronto concerts, we included the reading of poetry from Karen Van Dyck’s translated volume, Austerity Measures. Our continuous goal is to gradually incorporate a broader variety of early-career or “emerging” composers into this programming, and to likewise continuously perform and record pieces that have never/scarcely/poorly been presented in public.