Selected Works · Live Performance · Research & Protocols
This is the current sound practice, apart from the albums that i record ( you can listen them here )
The work brings together field recording, acoustic guitar, modular synthesis, voice and digital transformation. It explores memory, place and spatial perception through electroacoustic composition, fixed-media works and site-responsive research.
The pieces presented here move between environmental listening and instrumental reconstruction. Recorded reality is rarely treated as neutral documentation: it becomes unstable material, altered by memory, distance and the act of listening itself.
-> All music and sound works presented here are conceived, composed, performed, recorded and edited by Zi Iacchos. No generative AI is used in the creation of the music or audio.
Featured Works
Sonic Memory Reconstruction — Memory as Human Generative System
2026 · Acousmatic composition · Selected for NOIS//E Festival & Symposium, Milan
Sonic Memory Reconstruction (SMR™) begins with a recorded acoustic event that is deliberately withheld from listening. The event is then reconstructed from memory through instrumental and electronic means.
When the original recording is finally reintroduced, omissions, distortions, inventions and displacements become compositional material. The work does not attempt to restore an objective past; it listens to memory itself as an unstable human generative system.
Selected for NOIS//E 2026 Festival & Symposium.
The work will be presented on Sunday, 15 November 2026 at Fondazione Sozzani in Milan, as part of “Walk, listen & watch — Sound and video artworks across the gallery in the Acousmatic Listening Room, Milan, 13–15 November 2026.
The Fire Has Four Faces
2026 · 10’20 » · Four-channel fixed-media composition
The Fire Has Four Faces is conceived for four discrete channels. Guitar, flute, modular oscillator and voice occupy separate spatial positions and are organised around a descending A–G–F–E cell.
Each source behaves as an autonomous face of the same musical object: sometimes isolated, sometimes confronting or contaminating the others.
The version presented online is a stereo reduction of the original four-channel composition and cannot reproduce its complete spatial configuration.
Cuando la máquina calla
2026 · 6’49 » · Electroacoustic composition
Cuando la máquina calla explores the relationship between the human body, machinery and power through a recurring musical cell associated with Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
Mechanical noise, unstable pulses and digital erosion progressively absorb the motif. As the machinery disintegrates, space opens and the cell returns in a fragile, exposed form.
Created for Morada Sónica’s international Metropolis project and published by Wet Dreams Records.
Modular Topographies 1 — Hoi An, Vietnam
2026 · 8’48 » · Stereo electroacoustic work
The first chapter of an ongoing series in which a place becomes the starting point for an electroacoustic geography.
Rather than presenting Hoi An as a documentary portrait, the work treats location as a shifting field of distances, densities and remembered resonances. Environmental material and electronic transformation produce a topography that belongs simultaneously to the physical place and to its later recollection.
-> Currently submitted to a competition
Cartas al mar Dulce
Tres cartas sonoras dirigidas al Río de la Plata, ese río tan ancho que los primeros navegantes llamaron Mar Dulce. Pieza creada para la convocatoria Monteaudio 2026, dedicada a la resiliencia, en Montevideo, Uruguay.
I. Madeira: las aguas de la montaña y las bananeras, y el recuerdo de las familias isleñas que llegaron a fundar Montevideo.
II. Granville: el Atlántico que une a Francia con los poetas nacidos en Montevideo, Lautréamont, Laforgue y Supervielle.
III. Hvar: las campanas de la isla y el eco de quienes partieron de Croacia hacia el Río de la Plata.
Poemas en español, guitarra acústica y síntesis modular, modulados por grabaciones de campo hechas en cada lugar.
—
Three sound letters to the Río de la Plata, the river so wide that early navigators called it the Sweet Sea. Commissioned through Monteaudio’s 2026 call on resilience, Montevideo, Uruguay. From Madeira, Granville and Hvar: Spanish poems, acoustic guitar and modular synthesis shaped by field recordings made in each place.
Pig
2026 · 1’00 » · Electroacoustic miniature Pedro Bericat / Mute Sound, Saragosse
Created for Pedro Bericat’s 1 Minute Autohypnosis project, Mute Sound, Zaragoza, Spain, 2026
PIG is a one-minute composition built around a field recording made beneath a lodging in Hội An, Vietnam.
The animal presence is gradually reframed through guitar, modular synthesis tuned to A = 432 Hz, bit-crushed textures and stereo movement. Rather than illustrating the recording, the piece treats it as a fleeting acoustic memory: physical, comic, unsettling and transformed by the act of listening.
Indra’s Reflection
Electroacoustic composition — 8’19” — 2026
Indra’s Reflection is inspired by Indra’s Net: an image of reality in which every element contains and reflects all the others.
Four sonic layers—keyboards, guitar, field recordings and modular synthesis—interact around a central pulse of approximately 88 BPM, framed by a free opening and ending. Tuned around A = 432 Hz, the composition develops through resonance, mirroring and mutual transformation rather than following a single linear progression.
The work moves through emergence, listening, interpenetration, expansion and gradual dissolution. Each sound retains its own identity while continuously altering the perception of the whole.
Format: stereo, 24-bit / 48 kHz
Duration: 8’19”
Submitted to SPECTRA 2026, organised by ArtMeMLab in Ghent.
In the Pagoda
2026 · 1’52 » · Radio miniature
« In the Pagoda » moves from environmental listening toward instrumental transformation.
A field recording establishes the acoustic space. Guitar and flute then emerge gradually, not as an accompaniment but as traces of an inner response to the place. The piece explores the point at which documentation becomes memory, and memory begins to compose.
To the Sound of Bells
2026 · 6’59 · stereo · fixed media
« To the Sound of Bells » began on the shores of Lake Bled, Slovenia, where I recorded distant and nearby bells, water lapping beneath the mountain and passing walkers. The lake’s soundmark is a bell: legend says a widow’s bell sank to its depths in 1534 and still rings at night from under the water. Written for the « Soundmarks » call of Sonic Darts on Resonance FM, the piece takes up R. Murray Schafer’s idea of the sound that defines a place and its community.
Long soundscapes alternate with fragments of water turned into rhythm by an envelope follower, which drives acoustic guitar and analogue modular synthesis.
A short spoken poem, in English and Welsh, echoes another drowned land whose bells are said to ring beneath the sea: Cantre’r Gwaelod. Walking around the lake becomes a way of circling memory itself, surrounded by phantom walkers. The work belongs to Sonic Memory Reconstruction (SMR), my research method on how places are remembered through sound.
Field recordings, acoustic guitar, modular synthesis, voice and text: Zi Iacchos.
LIVE PERFORMANCE
Luminære
A site-responsive, three-act performance for voice, acoustic guitar and modular synthesis · approx. 20 minutes, extendable to 30 minutes by arrangement
Luminære unfolds in three acts, moving from a text shaped by the host site to a sung composition and a final instrumental response to the space.
The opening combines a spoken poem, developed through research into the site and its traditions, with modular sound.
In the central act, voice, acoustic guitar and modular synthesis come together; the guitar becomes part of the electronic texture. The text can be translated into the language agreed with the venue.
In the final act, voice and guitar stop. The modular system is played by hand in response to the room’s physical height, acoustics and reverberation. Density, volume and resonance shape this closing passage, which ends with a decisive cut.
-> Each presentation is prepared in relation to its host site. The first two acts establish a shared listening space; the final act responds to the room and the conditions of that performance.
Instrumental excerpt from the studio recording
Research & Protocols
— ->
Sonic Memory Reconstruction (SMR™)
Sonic Memory Reconstruction is an artistic research method developed by Zi Iacchos around the instability of auditory memory.
A — Recorded Reality
A real acoustic event is recorded.
B — Memory Reconstruction
Without listening to the recording again, the event is reconstructed from memory through voice, instruments, objects or electronic means.
A ↔ B — Confrontation
The original event and its remembered reconstruction are compared. Omissions, distortions, inventions and changes of duration, timbre or distance are identified.
C0 — Transformation Statement
A brief spoken statement records the perceived differences and the artistic decisions that follow from them.
C — Remembered Transformation
The original recording is transformed according to the discrepancies revealed by memory.
D — Spatial Composition
The different states of the event become the material for a spatial composition, installation or live activation.
The process considers memory not as an imperfect archive, but as an active and generative compositional force.
THE ENVIRONMENT WE CARRY — Research in progress
The Environment We Carry explores how the places we inhabit shape attention. I make short field recordings alongside notes on what I experience while listening. These materials become the basis for a composition in which sounds remain distinct, begin to overlap and mask one another, then return with different spacing and distance.
Initial listening and recording sessions have begun in Paris. The diagram shows a proposed way of working with these sounds, not a finished composition or a representation of clinical data. The project remains open to further listening, experimentation and dialogue.
Listen and Collaborate
Selected works are available through SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
For commissions, exhibitions, residencies, spatial presentations and interdisciplinary collaborations, Thanks for getting in touch
Zi