Naphántasto
Naphántasto
Naphántasto is an interplay between performing gesture, sound sculpture, and the listener’s personal illusions. A shared space where composition, improvisation, and nonverbal storytelling coexist.
Sometimes hands moves through the air playing an invisible instrument, with sounds leaping out of each micro-movement. At other times hands reshapes a malleable sonic sculpture, carving, stretching, or twisting the details of a precomposed phrase.
A sound may be born in the very moment you hear it, or it may begin as a phrase composed in the past and then be resculpted live.
Gestures become music, music becomes gesture, and meaning hovers between the movements of the hands, the sounds themselves, and the listener’s perception.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Naphántasto explores the ground between live electronics, acousmatic listening, and perceptual illusion. It uses a real-time gesture-controlled set of instruments combined with pre-constructed musical fragments, blending malleable noise textures, structured composition, and gestural narratives.
Taking inspiration from the craft of mentalists (mental magic), the work plays with hidden cause and perceived effect, induces musical associations within the audience’s imagination.
The performer, using bare hands, enacts gesture-controlled instruments while in parallel live recomposing/deconstructing music fragments, modulating layers, modifying density, and altering texture through a process of gestural orchestration. Gesture-controlled modulations suggest direct sonic causality.
Even pre-composed materials remain flexible, with chosen layers responsive to real-time gestures
The performance shifts constantly between three personas:
• The reckless noise sculptor (wild, messy, indulgent sound exploration)
• The gourmet composer (crafting detailed layered structures)
• The emotional storyteller (an empathic approach, invoking direct connection)
Phivos-Angelos Kollias | GR/DE
Phivos-Angelos Kollias is a Berlin/Athens-based composer and music technologist. His projects incorporate cables, sensors, code, microphones, speakers, musical instruments, and anything else that can become an interactive medium for musical expression. He studied classical and electronic composition in Cambridge, London, and Paris and completed his PhD in interdisciplinary applications of self-organization in interactive composition (Université Paris VIII) with scholarships from the Onassis Foundation, the Friends of Music Association (Alexandra Trianti), the Greek Composers Union and the Leventis Foundation.
His music is a dialogue between acoustic aesthetics, classical orchestration, noise sensibility, metal timbres, and electronic idioms. His musical curiosity is driven equally by playing with the absurd and the ridiculous, as well as exploring the depths of interdisciplinary theories and artificial intelligence technologies.
Kollia is co-founder and artistic lead of Echorroes a human-centered AI and interactive music initiative for children and adults.
His works have received nine awards and nine distinctions at international events (FIVARS, Iannis Xenakis Competition, Musicworks, etc.). Collaborations include ZKM, Greek National Opera, Deutscher Musikrat, Musikfonds Berlin, Dell, Transmediale, Ars Electronica, and IMPAKT. He also composes music for video games and VR installations with international teams; projects that have won twelve distinctions, from Apple TV Game of the Year to the Gamescom Indie Award, as well as mentions in Forbes lists.