Sound Works

Recorded in 2010, released in 2021 on Bandcamp
Personnel: Stefano Kalonaris (guitar, electronics), Andrea Parkins (laptop, accordeon), Shabaka Hutchings (clarinet, tenor sax), Liran Donin (bass), Maurizio Ravalico (percussion, objects), Javier Carmona (drums)

A triptych of short improvisations. Each musician can only listen to the musician on her/his left, and be listened to from her/his right. The sound eventually travels through the channel and what each player will experience is but a trace of the interactions that unfolded. The overall sound structure remains inaccessible to each player, but it's there for us to listen to.

Recorded in 2009, released in 2020 on Bandcamp
Personnel: Stefano Kalonaris (guitar), Stephane Payen (alto sax), and Francesco Pastacaldi (drums)

Original compositions offering a sophisticated blend of polymetric structures, jagged melodies, free improvisation, all infused with South Indian carnatic spices and West African chili.

Recorded between 2009 and 2010, released in 2020 on Bandcamp
Personnel: Stefano Kalonaris (guitar, electronics), Stephane Payen (alto sax), Tom Mudd (electronics), Andrea Parkins (laptop), Annette Krebbs (electronics), Benedict Taylor (viola), Ricardo Jacinto (cello, electronics), Aonghus McEvoy (prepared guitar), Francesco Pastacaldi (drums)

A small collection of short impromptu pieces (duo & trio).

Deep Songs

by The Man Who Laughs

1. Sophisticated Lady
2. Sweet Georgia Brown
3. Deep Song
4. Eclipse
5. Yesterdays
6. Duke Ellington's Sound of Love
7. I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone
8. I Must Have That Man
9. Strange Fruit

Recorded and released in 2010 with the F-IRE record label (CD 38).
Personnel: Stefano Kalonaris (guitar), Fumi Okiji (vocals)

The Man Who Laughs was an original duo active between 2009 — 2011 and performing vocal led jazz noir old classics reinventions over sample-based tapestries of outer space and historical recordings.

Surprisingly compelling, a modern take on jazz noir which successfully inhabits the style's signature ambiance of bittersweet nocturnal heartache and emotional and temporal dislocation.

Chris May,   — All About Jazz

It is something of a cliché to say that an artist sheds fresh light on staple songs courtesy of an entirely original approach, but in the case of The Man Who Laughs it is simply the truth: the songs are made to stand out in all their stark beauty against backdrops that range from African drumming to free jazz and space bleeps.

Chris Parker,   — The Vortex online reviews

Humble, strange, unexpected, The Man Who Laughs' gig is as much an art performance as a concert. Their nocturnal and dream-like songs are an unusual experience, and gave the local residents of Walthamstow a soft electroshock.

Anais Bremond,   — London Jazz Festival

The Man Who Laughs' songs have the flavor of lost jazz standards from some forgotten smoky lounge in downtown America. Yet set against hints of Afro rhythm and interspersed with fragments of urban field recordings there is an odd sense of dislocation, something out of time, shot through with disconcerting echoes and submerged memories.

Noel Taylor,   — Luna Fringe Mix3

Recorded during 2018 at Prah Foundation, Radio Margate, and during Athelstan Sound sessions at Resort Studios in Margate. Released in 2020 on Bandcamp
Personnel: Stefano Kalonaris, Claire Orme, Ruth Duckworth, Tom Adams, Lillian Henley, Jason Hodgson, Christopher Salter-Anderson, Dan Scott, Martin Tanton, Rosa Irwin Clark, Colin Johnson, Liene Steinberga Cesar, Sam Slattery, Matthew De Pulford

Crossing the Line

by Time Zone

1. Conjunto
2. Lista de Espera
3. Deep Song
4. Bilingual
5. Snakepath
6. Miracle Maricel
7. Fine Line
8. International Dateline

Released in 2011 with Spherical Records.
Personnel: Loz Speyer (trumpet), Martin Hathaway (alto sax), Stefano Kalonaris (guitar, tres), Davide Mantovani (double bass), Simon Pearson (drums), Maurizio Ravalico (percussion)

Sideman with Time Zone, a group performing Cuban-inspired jazz fusion original compositions by Loz Speyer.

Perhaps the most striking contribution, however [...], come from guitarist Stefano Kalonaris, who somehow contrives to be pleasantly spiky one minute, mellifluous the next.

Chris Parker,   — London Jazz News

Live @ Charlie Wrights

by Shabaka & The Earth

Tore Sætre, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Recorded live at Charlie Wrights, Hoxton, London, in June 2010 and released for the first time in this article on The Wire magazine in 2018.
Personnel: Shabaka Hutchings (tenor sax), Stefano Kalonaris (guitar), Liran Donin (double bass), and Javier Carmona (drums)

Sideman in Shabaka Hutchings's short-lived trio Shabaka & The Earth, a precursor to the Sons Of Kemet venture.

Rhythms of the city

by Rhythms of the city

1. El Preso
2. Riva
3. Astral
4. Ilu Ayê
5. Aguanile Bonko
6. Rua Brasileira
7. Beco da Vida
8. ROTC
9. RESPECT
10. Aldeia de Okarimbé

Released on F-IRE records in 2007.

Played violão de sete cordas, cavaquinho, and caixa in RotC, a samba de enredo bloco directed by Barak Schmool and based at City University, London.

RotC 7-string guitarist Stefano Kalonaris is a special delight on "Ilu Aye".

Chris May,   — All About Jazz

Duel Revisited is an original networked piece inspired by Xenakis's Duel (1962), a zero-sum game of musical strategy. Duel Revisited was premiered at the Xenakis Networked Performance Marathon, part of the Meta - Xenakis Symposium on 2022.12.17. More details here.

A free improvisation duo set for a multi-lineup experimental music concert. Recorded on 2018.09.08 at Otooto, Tokyo, Japan.

Solo live coding set at the second iteration of Criss Cross, a recurrent audiovisual event organized by S. Kalonaris and C. Orme. Recorded on 2018.02.27 at Limbo, Margate, UK.

Duoing is a series of human-machine duo performances between S. Kalonaris and his co-creative computational improviser Dory. This system was premiered at the Improvisational Creativity Workshop organized by Sensilab at Monash Univeristy, Prato, Italy, on 2017.07.20.

TN4FI is a networked piece of musical strategy based on Bayesian games of inference. It is part of a series that draws on game theory and probabilistic graphical models. It was performed at Sonorities, Belfast, Northern Ireland, on 2016.11.27. More details here.

MRF4FI is a networked piece of musical strategy based on Markov Random Fields. It was performed at the Diffrazioni Multimedia Festival, Florence, Italy, on 2016.11.24. More details here.

Soundscape Voyeurism #1 is a fixed media composition generated using soundwalk recordings of the Ishigaki port, Okinawa. Premiered at the TAma Music and Arts Festival (TAMA), Tokyo, Japan, on 2021.03.20. The festival had as theme: Environment & Sound.

Contribution of an audio-reactive system to a live installation with the Athelstan Sound collective, based around Satie's concept of Furniture Music and presented at the Flat38 gallery on 2018.02.10. Read more about Athelstan Sound here, or listen to a related album here.

Invited contribution to Tom Mudd's interactive sound installation Control, presented in 2015 at Cafe Oto Project Space.

An interactive installation made with cheap, off-the-shelf game & MIDI controllers. Part of The Art and Science of Sound event, at the 2015 NI Science Festival.