Anthony Pateras

Anthony Peter Pateras (born 1979) is an Australian-born composer, pianist and electronic musician.

He has released several solo albums and collaborated with other artists.

Pateras has performed and recorded in Australia, North America and Europe.

Anthony Peter Pateras was born in 1979 and grew up in Melbourne.

He received classical training on the piano.

His early band, Elemenopede, was formed in Melbourne in 1996 and played local venues including the Punters Club, Fitzroy.

The line-up was Pateras on keyboards, Greg Craske on guitar, Luke Fitzgerald on drums, Dan Flynn on vocals and Mark Woodford on bass guitar.

They released an extended play, I'm with Stupid, in May 1998, launched at the Punters Club, but they had disbanded by early 2001.

Pateras started tertiary education at La Trobe University, studying composition with Graeme Leak, Neil Kelly and John McCaughey.

He was a sound composer for a play, Carboni, written by John Romeril and performed at the Carlton Courthouse in June 1999.

Between December 1999 and June 2001, he recorded Malfunction Studies, in Melbourne, New York and Copenhagen.

Fellow musicians were Collings on cello, Elemenopede bandmate Fitzgerald on percussion, Justine Anderson as soprano, Jane Burnside on clarinet, Kathy Cameron as alto, Tom Chiu on violin, Matt Dowling on violin, Emily Hayes as mezzo-soprano, Luke Peyton on turntable and percussion, Helle Thun as soprano and Victorian College of the Arts' Percusion Ensemble on various percussion instruments.

For William 37 (November–December 2001) at La Mama, Pateras worked with Jeremy Collings on the soundscape, which Kate Herbert of The Herald Sun reviewed, "[it] has some appropriate and interesting moments but is often too loud, intrusive and poorly placed."

From 2001 till 2006 Pateras scored short films; two of which were accepted in the Cinéfondation section at the Cannes Film Festival: Ben Hackworth's Martin Four (2001) and Pia Borg's Footnote (2004).

He curated the Articulating Space concert series from 2001, which transformed into the Melbourne International Biennale of Exploratory Music, in 2008.

Pateras' early works include the percussion solo Mutant Theatre, written for Vanessa Tomlinson and premiered in March 2001 at the Melbourne Museum.

It was released as a CD album in 2002.

"Chromatophore for 8 amplified strings" was composed for the inaugural Cybec Melbourne Symphony Orchestra 21st Century Composers' Program in 2003.

Mutant Theatre was issued as his solo album via John Zorn's Tzadik Records in January 2004.

It was rated by AllMusic's staff writer as three-and-a-half stars out-of five.

Pateras composed the tracks, provided piano, prepared piano and vocals, and conducted the session musicians as well as co-producing the work.

The piece was selected as a Recommended Work at the International Rostrum of Composers in 2004, and in 2006 was performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Brett Dean.

In 2007 he completed his PhD at Monash University with Thomas Reiner.

Pateras' thesis was, "Exploratory combinations of composition, improvisation and electronics based on relationships between form and timbre."

As an undergraduate Pateras scored numerous theatrical productions at La Mama, The Carlton Courthouse, LaTrobe Student Theatre and Belvoir St Theatre.

He toured with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in 2007, composing "Autophagy, for amplified string quintet, prepared piano and electronics."

The Sydney Morning Herald's critic Peter McCallum observed, "[it's] a rough sound world of spikes, thuds and wispy slides like black lines painted roughly on bare brick."

Both "Chromatophore for 8 amplified strings" and "Autophagy" appear on his solo album, Chromatophore (September 2008).

AllMusic's François Couture described the album, "there is no real theme, genre, form, or instrumentation running through the six works... except [his] creativity and broad palette."

Steven Hodgson of Australian Music Centre (AMC) reviewed the work's last part, Refractions (2008), "highly sectionalised, progressing from texture to texture with a continued sense that pitch and rhythmic materials have been selected to serve the instrumental combination in use at any particular time."

Pateras composed and conducted a performance, Percussion Portrait, at the Melbourne Recital Centre in 2009.

It brought together two groups: Clocked Out (Nozomi Omote, Vanessa Tomlinson) from Brisbane and Speak Percussion (Nat Grant, Peter Neville, Matthias Schack-Arnott, Eugene Ughetti) from Melbourne.

At the APRA Music Awards' Art Music Awards, he has been nominated three times: 2011 for Performance of the Year for his composition, Refractions, performed by Clocked Out and Speak Percussion; 2012 for Work of the Year – Instrumental for Flesh and Ghost performed by Speak Percussion; and 2015 for Performance of the Year for Beauty Will Be Amnesiac or Will not Be at All performed by Synergy Percussion.

At the APRA Music Awards of 2011, Refractions, was nominated for an Art Music Award for Performance of the Year as delivered by Clocked Out and Speak Percussion.

At the APRA Music Awards of 2012 Pateras was nominated for Art Music Award for Work of the Year – Instrumental for Flesh and Ghost, which was performed by Speak Percussion in September 2011.

The judging panel described Flesh and Ghost, as "a wonderfully epic piece where the composer utilises the 12-player percussion ensemble beautifully, creating a one sound world and a lovely sense of texture. It has a sense of space with spectrums of sound."

Pateras provided the score for the psychological thriller film, Errors of the Human Body (2012), directed by Eron Sheean and starring Michael Eklund, Karoline Herfurth, Tómas Lemarquis and Rik Mayall.

The soundtrack album was released on Editions Mego.

In that year he composed Ontetradecagon – his interpretation of jazz musician, Miles Davis' work.

Pateras performed it live-in-the-studio for Andrew Ford's The Music Show on Radio National.