Australian composer, pianist, and electro-acoustic artist Anthony Pateras has long produced varied strains of intense, surreal experimental music. Since becoming active in the 1990s he achieved worldwide notice through albums on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records, beginning with the 2004 release Mutant Theatre, and on Peter Rehberg’s Editions Mego, where several projects involved Robin Fox. Additional group work encompasses the improv quintet Thymolphthalein and tētēma, the latter a noise-rock outfit formed with Mike Patton. Through his own Immediata label he has issued two multi-disc Collected Works anthologies of his compositions along with recordings made alongside Jérôme Noetinger, Stephen O’Malley, Erkki Veltheim, and further partners; a second O’Malley pairing, Sept Duos Pour Guitare Acoustique & Piano Préparé, appeared in 2023.
A Melbourne native, Pateras started classical piano studies at age five. Awarded a high-school music scholarship, he added saxophone and orchestral percussion, joined a chamber ensemble, and performed in metal and indie-rock groups before pursuing contemporary composition, improvisation, and audio engineering at La Trobe University. His first self-released album, Malfunction Studies, gathered pieces tracked in Melbourne, New York, and Copenhagen. Between 2001 and 2006 he composed scores for several short films, two of which screened at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2002 he launched an improvisation trio featuring guitarist David Brown and drummer Sean Baxter. The initial glitch-and-noise collaboration with Robin Fox, Coagulate, came out on Synaesthesia in 2003; the pair also appeared in Martin Ng’s Turntable Orchestra and the abstract hip-hop project Beta Erko. Tzadik issued Mutant Theatre, a survey of piano, percussion, and quintet pieces, in 2004. Two further Fox collaborations, Flux Compendium (2006) and End of Daze (2008), followed on Editions Mego. Sirr released the solo prepared-piano recording Chasms in 2007, while Pateras’s second Tzadik collection, Chromatophore, arrived in 2008. He next formed the duo PIVIXKI with grindcore drummer Max Kohane; the project yielded two albums and ultimately produced a live collaboration with Mike Patton in San Francisco.
Pateras joined the improv quintet Thymolphthalein, completed by Clayton Thomas, Jérôme Noetinger, Natasha Anderson, and Will Guthrie; their debut, Ni Maître, Ni Marteau, appeared on Editions Mego in 2011. The same imprint released his score for the psychological thriller Errors of the Human Body in 2012. He then inaugurated Immediata with the five-CD box set Collected Works 2002–2012. Reuniting with Patton, he launched tētēma, whose first album, Geocidal, came out on Ipecac in 2014. A second Thymolphthalein disc, Mad Among the Mad, surfaced on Immediata in 2015, which rapidly followed with further Pateras-related releases including Astral Colonels (with Valerio Tricoli), 176 (with Chris Abrahams), and North of North (with Erkki Veltheim and Scott Tinkler). By decade’s end additional collaborations with Stephen O’Malley, eRikm, Rohan Drape, and Noetinger had been documented, together with Collected Works, Vol. II (2005–2018).
Bocian Records issued the ensemble performance Pseudacusis in 2021. The traces of a mistake, the most simple one possible the reactions of even younger children, a Drape collaboration, appeared on Superpang. Two further 2023 releases, Two Solos on Futura Resistenza and A Dread of Voids on Another Timbre, joined 15 Coruscations with Noetinger on Penultimate Press and the O’Malley project Sept Duos Pour Guitare Acoustique & Piano Préparé on Shelter Press/La Becque Editions.
