Phantomnesis: Voices Against Forgetting
Six pieces for the forgotten, the half-remembered, and the voices that refuse to fade.
About the Phantomnesis: Voices Against Forgetting
Phantomnesis is a project about what remains after memory loosens its grip. It looks at the forgotten, the near-forgotten, and the reimagined: neglected musical systems, regional practices, extinct gestures, and overlooked aesthetic pathways. The idea is that what is absent can still speak, and that sound can carry memory as something both present and beyond reach.
This compilation gathers six pieces by Sina Karachiani, Michalis Andronikou, Amirhossein Zeinali, Yunmeng Su, and Helen Caddick. Each takes a different route to the theme. Some mourn a teacher or a people, some treat silence as an archive, and one turns a London ghost story into music. The works are written for string quartet, trombone and harp, violin and cello, double bass and piano, and soprano with orchestra and gathered sound. What links them is a shared attention to traces: what lingers, what is withheld, and what returns.
The sequence begins in solitude with a quartet that sounds like a whispered prayer. It then moves through remembrance and mourning, with a duet for trombone and harp and a duet for violin and cello. Two works follow that treat memory as presence in absence, one for double bass and piano and one for string quartet, which hears silence as sediment. The album closes on its widest canvas, with soprano, orchestra, and the sounds of London's streets.
Pieces and Voices
Sina Karachiani (b. 1996, Esfahan, Iran) is a San Francisco-based Iranian-American composer, pianist, artist, and engineer. His music fuses Western classical and Persian traditions, exploring identity, vulnerability, love, and laughter through intricate flowing melodies and colourful orchestration. His works have been performed by ensembles including the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and the Bergamot Quartet, and have won several awards. He was selected for Salastina's Composer Collective, and he graduated summa cum laude from the University of Southern California with dual degrees in music composition and computer science.
Orison by Sina Karachiani
"Orison" for string quartet invites listeners into a deeply personal realm of contemplation and introspection, akin to a prayer whispered in solitude. Drawing on influences from the composer's Iranian heritage, the piece weaves together ornate melodies that possess a free-flowing and improvisatory quality, following the rich and expressive traditions found in traditional and folk Persian music. The music unfolds as if detached from the external world, exploring the intricate landscape of inner emotions, marked by longing and yearning, turbulence, a sense of reaching and falling, and moments of hope and optimism.
Instrumentation: string quartet
"A prayer is only ever overheard by the one who says it, and in that privacy, longing finds its truest shape."
Michalis Andronikou is a composer and musicologist who lives in Calgary, Alberta. He holds a PhD in composition from the University of Calgary, and bachelor's and integrated master's degrees in musicology from the Department of Music Studies at the University of Athens. He also holds diplomas in classical guitar, clarinet, and music theory from Trinity College and the Royal Academy of Music, and a diploma in Byzantine music from the Argyroupolis Municipal Conservatory. He earned credentials in harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and composition, with Theodore Antoniou, at the Hellenic Conservatory, and he has studied Greek folk instruments such as the lute, tampoura, and bouzouki. He has composed for small and large ensembles, theatre, art exhibits, film, and song. Ten CDs of his work have been released since 2003, and his scores are published by Cypress Choral Music, Palliser Music Publishing, Balkanota, Da Vinci Edition, Trübcher Music Editions, and Alea Publishing & Recording. He is an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre and a member of the Canadian League of Composers, the Greek Composers Union, and the Center of Cypriot Composers.
In Memoriam Theodore Antoniou by Michalis Andronikou
The work's sparse textures and fragmentary gestures allow musical figures to emerge like apparitions from silence. The harp's resonances and the trombone's sustained tones feel like voices that materialize and then dissolve, suggesting the presence of a memory that cannot be fully grasped. Rather than quoting or narrating directly, the piece evokes the teacher's memory as a ghostly presence, something felt rather than stated.
Within the duet structure, a haunting dialogue unfolds. The harp seems to whisper, recall, or echo, while the trombone calls out, responds, and fades away. This interplay captures the delicate tension between absence and presence, as if each instrument embodies a different mode of memory: the faint recollection and the resonant call that awakens it.
Because the motives are never fully laid out, often beginning and fading before reaching completion, the listener becomes acutely aware of what remains unsaid: the gaps, the silences, the withheld gestures. This elusiveness lies at the core of the work's spectral logic, where meaning resides as much in what is concealed as in what is revealed.
The music also opens a sense of layered time. The listener experiences not only the present performance but also the lingering memory of Theodore Antoniou and, perhaps, the composer's own dialogue with his teacher. These temporal layers coexist, intertwined within the sonic fabric. The past is not something concluded; it continues to resonate quietly through the present.
Emotion in this piece arises not from grand statements but from restraint. Its fragile gestures, subtle decays, and implied lament express feeling through understatement. This quiet intensity reflects a spectral aesthetic in which emotion lingers in echoes, in the spaces between sounds, rather than through overt proclamation.
The work's ending, with its unresolved fade and lingering resonance, resists closure. That resistance mirrors the nature of remembrance itself: memory does not conclude; influence does not end. The final sounds seem to dissolve into the air, leaving the listener with the sense that the teacher's presence continues beyond the piece.
Ultimately, the musical materials themselves (intervals, gestures, timbres) become acts of remembrance. They are not merely about Antoniou; they are the process of remembering him. The spirit of Phantomnesis lives within this construction: the sense that what is absent can still speak, that sound can carry memory as something simultaneously present and beyond reach.
The work is a spontaneous and dreamy gesture of appreciation and remembrance of the late Theodore Antoniou, who was a composition teacher for Andronikou. It is dedicated to Achilles Liarmakopoulos and Coline-Marie Orliac, who premiered and recorded it with so much love and artistry.
Performed by Achilles Liarmakopoulos (trombone) and Coline-Marie Orliac (harp)
"Memory is not what we keep but what keeps calling us, a voice that arrives only as it fades."
Amirhossein Zeinali (b. 2000) is an Iranian composer whose work explores the intersection of Persian musical traditions and Western contemporary music, crafting a personal and intercultural artistic voice. He holds a bachelor's degree in composition from the Art University of Isfahan and a master's degree in composition from the University of Utah, where he studied with Miguel Chuaqui, Elisabet Curbelo, and Jessica Rudman. He is currently pursuing a PhD in composition at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. His music has been featured at SEAMUS, NYCEMF, the Marginale Transmedia Arts and Electronic Music Festival, NACUSA, the Belvedere Chamber Music Festival, and the Sunset ChamberFest, and broadcast on Radiophrenia and Resonance FM. The Utah Philharmonia commissioned him through the 2024–2025 Steve Roens Prize and performed his orchestral work In Search of Simorgh. "Elegy" was selected as a winner of the 2026 Art Music Society Call for Scores.
Elegy by Amirhossein Zeinali
"Elegy" is a tribute to the innocent Iranian civilians killed in the twelve-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025. It contemplates loss, resilience, and the stillness of mourning. Violin and cello converse in lyrical lines and purposeful dissonance. The pitch material comes from the Esfahan modal system, and the non-metered, ornamented style recalls the kamancheh.
Instrumentation: violin and cello
"Grief asks for no argument, only for stillness wide enough to hold the names we cannot say."
Michalis Andronikou, a composer and musicologist with a PhD in composition from the University of Calgary, also appears on this album with his duet for trombone and harp. His studies in composition with Theodore Antoniou, his ten released CDs, and his publications with houses in Canada, Bulgaria, Italy, England, and the United States are described in his entry above.
Remembrance by Michalis Andronikou
"Remembrance" is a musical meditation on memory and absence, drawing attention to what is nearly forgotten. Through its delicate textures and subtle shifts, the piece evokes the quiet traces of lives, stories, and experiences that linger on the edge of remembrance. By giving sound to these near-forgotten elements, it invites listeners to reflect on loss, memory, and the act of remembering itself, transforming what is almost lost into a vivid, present experience.
Performed by Konstantinos Sifakis (double bass) and Alfonso Gonzalez (piano)
"What is nearly forgotten is not lost; it waits at the edge of attention for someone willing to listen."
Yunmeng "Yumi" Su is a Chinese composer, arranger, and educator based in Gainesville, Florida.
"Covert Silence" emerges from a reflection on silence as a repository of forgotten orders. While reconsidering the relationship between beauty and structure, Su returned to a passage from the science-fiction novel The Three-Body Problem. In describing the Trisolaran civilization, the book notes: "Those pipe structures that appeared tangled and utterly without pattern nevertheless revealed a harmonious sense of beauty—a direction of beauty entirely different from humanity's preference for order: the beauty of chaos. Yet this kind of beauty was no less compelling than any meticulously measured symmetry."
Covert Silence by Yunmeng Su
By shifting the thematic focus from chaos to silence, the work asks how quietude might carry traces of the forgotten and the nearly-forgotten. Silence here is not emptiness but sediment—an accumulation of faded gestures, suppressed structures, and residual resonances: musical logics that once proclaimed themselves openly but now persist only faintly, embedded beneath the audible surface.
Su's compositional approach treats silence as an archaeological layer, within which fractured motives, spectral relationships, and overlooked aesthetic pathways continue to breathe in partial memory. Rather than foregrounding overt development, the piece invites listeners to attend to what lies beneath: the near-erasures, delicate alignments, and subtle energies that survive only as shadows of prior sound.
In dialogue with the ethos of Phantomnesis, the work reimagines silence as a medium through which what risks being lost may resonate again. Listening becomes an act of recovery—bringing forgotten or obscured musical orders back into the present and allowing them to emerge gently, transformatively, and with renewed meaning.
Instrumentation: string quartet (two violins, viola, cello)
"Silence is not the absence of order but its sediment, the place where forgotten structures keep their quiet shape."
Helen Caddick is a London-born, award-winning composer with a distinctive compositional style, described as "powerful, evocative, modern and original." Her work displays an acute ear for orchestral colour, rhythmic impetus, and detailed texture. Her music has been performed at venues and festivals including the Teatro Nacional Guatemala, the Sinetan Musikkjuhlat Festival, the Tête à Tête Opera Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Belgium's Klassiek Centraal, and Late Junction on BBC 3. She is a Royal Philharmonic Society shortlisted composer. She has been supported by Arts Council England, PRS Foundation's Women Make Music, the PRSF Open Fund, the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, and the Vaughan Williams Foundation. She is a former lecturer at Trinity Laban Conservatoire and associate lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her scores are available through Composers Edition, and her recordings are on Bandcamp.
R A C E S – Tales from the Anechoic Chamber by Helen Caddick
Scored for soprano, orchestra, and gathered sound, T R A C E S – Tales from the Anechoic Chamber (11'30") engages with the idea of the forgotten and the reimagined through historical references, archive documents, found sounds, and lived experience. It is inspired by the true account of an influencer who, in an attempt to break a world record, spent several hours in an anechoic chamber, a room suspended in space and possibly the quietest room in the world. TRACES brings to life the happenings he witnessed there. Plunged in darkness, as time passed he heard an underground train, saw rats scurrying around the room, and then saw a woman in white appear, all conjured from his imagination. Caddick's work raises the question: but what if they had been real?
Through research in London's archives, Caddick decided that the visitor could have been Sarah Whitehead, a young girl who became known as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. Sightings of her have been reported up to 2001, although her history has all but been forgotten. Sarah was only 19 years old in 1811 when her beloved brother, Paul Whitehead, was found guilty of fraud at the Old Bailey and subsequently executed. In an attempt to protect his sister, he made sure she was out of the area when he was arrested and left instructions that she not be told of his fate. Unaware of his death, and unsettled and upset by his sudden disappearance, Sarah continued to ask for her brother every day at the Bank of England, where he had worked. In Caddick's narrative, Sarah mistakes the influencer sitting in the darkened room for her brother.
TRACES touches on medieval London through to the present day. It weaves together the captured sounds of London's now subterranean and near-forgotten medieval River Fleet, the Sunday morning bells of St. Paul's Cathedral, and London's pigeons, dubbed "rats with wings" by some Londoners, although many are unaware that they are believed to have descended from medieval doves, a fact Caddick discovered through research. It also includes a Northern line Tube train thundering into Bank station, part of the oldest strand of the Northern line, which opened in 1890 and where the ghost of Sarah Whitehead has been reported to have been sighted. The general atmospheric sounds and hubbub of London's streets complete the mix.
The inclusion of wineglasses in the work reflects the mineral ceiling and floor of the anechoic chamber, which are created from spun glass. TRACES was premiered at St. Andrew's Church, Holborn, where underground trains could be heard rumbling far below, further playing with the audience's perception of the real, the recorded, and the imaginary.
Words by Helen Caddick, including a setting of the poem "On the Death of my Brother" by Jane Barker (1688). Performed by soprano Ruby Caddick Lawrence and Orchestra of the City, conducted by Chris Hopkins. Sounds gathered from London's streets by Helen Caddick and Humphrey James Percival, fed directly through the live performance by Percival. Recorded live by Mike Collins at St. Andrew's, Holborn, in December 2024. Mixed by Mike Collins at Big Jelly Studios. Supported by Arts Council England.
Instrumentation: soprano, orchestra, gathered sound (found sounds and wineglasses)
"We are haunted less by what has vanished than by our refusal to believe it could have been real."
Phantomnesis began as an international call from Cambiata Arts for unpublished recordings that bring the forgotten, the near-forgotten, and the reimagined into today's listening. It was open to composers and sound artists worldwide, with no submission fees. You can read the full call on the Phantomnesis call page.
Six jurors reviewed the submissions: composers, performers, researchers, a broadcaster, and a musicologist, working across electroacoustic music, Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian musical heritage, voice and physical performance, jazz scholarship, and new-music broadcasting. They are based in Toronto, Hannover, Skopje, Bangkok, and Tehran, and across Vienna, Graz, and Klagenfurt in Austria. Works were judged on their engagement with forgotten or near-forgotten material, their compositional richness, and their artistic conviction.
About the Phantomnesis Call
Phantomnesis: Voices Against Forgetting
Phantomnesis compilation · Six works
Release date: 2026
Curated and published by: CambiataArt Records
Rights: Each artist retains full ownership and rights to their work.
Release Details