Selected Work - Music — Constantinos Gallis

Constantinos Gallis
Cambridge, MA & Athens, GR

Hello, my name is Constantinos. I am a Greek-Swiss artist, musician & student based in Cambridge, MA & Athens, GR. I am currently pursuing a Master in City Planning & a Master of Architecture at MIT, & am a recipient of the Onassis Foundation Scholarship. I hold a BA in Urban Studies from Stanford University, where I graduated with departmental honors & distinction, & was awarded the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Research.
Through academic research, teaching, large-scale installations, performances, & audio-visual investigations, I have explored the effects of urban change on the natural environment & society. My work has been exhibited in Athens GR, Cambridge MA, Stanford CA & San Francisco CA.
I have honed my skills in planning & design at firms in London, GB, New York, NY & Athens, GR, working as an Architectural Assistant at Foster + Partners, an Urban Design Intern at WXY, a Neighborhood Strategies Intern at the NYCEDC, & as an Architectural Intern at Potiropoulos + Partners.
Alongside my partner, I develop work for Oo-PS, a collaborative research & design practice working across scales to produce narrative-driven artwork, writing, music & objects as ways of anticipating future socio-environmental challenges & designing theoretical methods to meet them.
I write, record, produce & occasionally perform music under the alias Shrinking Violet, a project that moves between ambient, dreampop & indie rock in an effort to create music about spaces, distance & uncertainty. Performing solo & alongside bandmates, I have opened for artists such as The Hellp, French Cassettes, & Illuminati Hotties.

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cgallis@mit.edu Instagram

Oo-PS

Shrinking Violet

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Music
Recorded Work & Performances

Atmospheres For WindhoverStanford, CA
A one-time live ambient performance of three thirty-minute sound pieces composed for Stanford's Windhover Contemplative Center. It was the first & only solo performance to take place at the Center. Named after Peter Zumthor's Atmospheres, the work combined drone & generative music with shoegaze & post-rock, with much of the texture left to chance or fully improvised.

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Third PlacesBerlin DE & Brooklyn, NY
A collection of twelve sound-art compositions derived from twelve distinct points in Berlin, produced during an independent study supported by the Chappell Lougee Scholarship. Drawing on Murray Schafer's understanding of sonic environments as "huge musical compositions" & Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji as a structural anchor, the project maps audiovisual environments through music informed by & informative of place.

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Experiences in a Changing CityAthens, GR
A debut album capturing two years of urban exploration across ten neighborhoods of greater Athens, with each song composed in response to a different place & lyrics drawn from conversations with residents across Athens. Packaged as a CD & book pairing accounts with original drawings, the album launch raised over €2000 for a local children's charity.

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Generation LossStanford, CA
A tape-degradation experiment revisiting an ambient song from my EP The Fourth Way, recorded onto cassette & then re-recorded across ten successive generations until each tape was more distorted than the last. Cassette inserts were assembled from hazy outlines made by laying on pieces of photographic paper, arranged in proportion to the degradation of each tape. The piece was released on Spotify & added to an editorial ambient playlist.

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Changing Too QuicklyHydra, GR
[w/ N. Vitoraki]
An album conceived during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the abrupt end of my final year of high school opened up time to write. Co-written with Nefeli Vitoraki & recorded in a primitive studio we set up on the island of Hydra, the songs trace our relationship while forced apart, alongside the anxieties the pandemic exacerbated, Nefeli's parents' recent divorce, & the loss of both my grandfathers just before we began.

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Various SinglesAll Over The Place
A body of ambient releases spanning from Shrinking Violet (2018), a debut EP inspired by Eno's Music for Airport, through soundtracks, generative experiments, & collaborative reworks. The collection includes audio degradation pieces, single-sitting improvisations, & ongoing reinterpretations of work by friends and collaborators.

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