Statement
Levant Noir is my practice as a composer and performer, between the modal traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gaelic music of Scotland’s islands. Old melodies from the lavta and mandolin meet modular electronics and field recordings, performed live or composed for film and dance. I am interested in how the presence of a place affects our collective memory, and the songs we make from it.
Listen first
Start here: two minutes, a lavta and the birds outside.
Blackbirds and a lavta
Listening room
Selected recordings and site-specific studies.
The full catalogue: music for screen, installation sound and rhythm studies
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LN·01
Blackbirds and a lavta
Improvising on the lavta at an open window in Glasgow, I realised the blackbirds were answering. A single unedited take, no electronics.
Technical dossier
lavta · single acoustic capture · open-window environmental resonance
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LN·02
Oud texture (Smyrna)
An oud passage recorded in the old stone bathhouse in Smyrna, frozen into granular micro-loops. Bendir and finger cymbals underneath.
Technical dossier
oud → granular freeze (Beads) · percussion → multi-tap delay (Magneto) · bells → pitch-shifted reverb (Mimeophon, Clouds) · stereo field rotation via Maths
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LN·05
Gothenburg port soundscape
Two sections of the sound installation I made for an exhibition on the history of Gothenburg’s port.
Technical dossier
stereo and binaural field recording · stereo microphone pair → Zoom F3 · recorded in the city, the port, on the ferry and at the seaside
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SC·01
White Rose
My score for the short film, written during film composition study at Guildhall. This is the version with my alternative ending.
Watch the film
Performance · Live Set
Between Two Shores: an imagined dialogue for lavta, mandolin, living electronics.
Old melodies from the Eastern Mediterranean tradition blend with the slow airs of the Hebrides. Drones, grain clouds, delays and explorations of space follow the excitation of the strings.
Suitable to be played solo or with a small ensemble, in listening rooms, galleries and old stone rooms.
Selected Live Documentation
- Live at Pianodrome, Edinburgh, with Samodiva Nestya & Friends
For bookings and technical requirements, write to hello@levantnoir.scot. A technical rider and a press kit are available on request.
Research · Critical Texts
Listening, gesture, and signal decay.
“The lavta’s frets are movable gut, displaced to hold microtones, set into the neck like geological strata. When I press between them, I meet the friction of many historical tuning systems on one fingerboard. My analogue electronics share this stubborn physicality: voltage drift, component age, the bloom of a filter on the edge of oscillation.”
An ongoing series of short critical pieces and field notes, on how Mediterranean modal memory, Scottish island geography, and psychoacoustics meet in what I play.
Biography
Ioannis Valasakis
I am Ioannis Valasakis. I live in Glasgow and perform as Levant Noir. I compose for acoustic instruments and live electronics, drawing on the modal traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gaelic music of Scotland’s islands. I write for film, dance and live performance, and make sound design for podcasts, installations and other artists.
I trained in classical guitar at the Hellenic Conservatory and studied makam and dastgah at Ross Daly’s Labyrinth Musical Workshop in Crete. At the Guildhall School in London I studied orchestration with Peter Longworth and film composition with Barbara De Biasi, and I studied soundscape composition with Barry Truax. I play the Istanbul lavta, mandolin and Cretan boulgari, with baritone guitar and bodhrán, and modular synthesis and tape loops beside them.
I hold a PhD in Neuroscience from King’s College London, and now study Applied Music at the University of the Highlands and Islands. Field recording and sound ecology run through all of it: I work with recordings of places and fragments from archives, find an order in them, then break it again. A current project listens to the Cromarty Firth, and to seabird colonies in the Aegean.
Enquiries
Commissions & Performance
I am open to commissions for film and documentary scores, live performance, site-specific sound design, and collaborative work.
- hello@levantnoir.scot
- Location & Study
- Archive & Media