Phoenix Rousiamanis

“I always think of creating any piece of art as like a spell; you put so much intention into it, so much focus, and you release it out.”

Phoenix Rousiamanis

Phoenix Rousiamanis is a UK-based Greek composer of instrumental and electronic music, songwriter, and performer. Phoenix composes around themes of folklore, queerness, nostalgia and magic, creating genre-defying music that finds beauty in dark, violent and uncomfortable contexts; her involvement in the trans community and activism are also integral in her artistic practice. Phoenix’s work has been performed by Juliet Fraser, Greek National Radio Orchestra (ERT), Riot Ensemble, Trans Chorus of Los Angeles and Psappha, among others, and at festivals such as Darmstadt Zeitströme Festival, Leicester International Music Festival and Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival; she was a London Philharmonic Orchestra Young Composer 2024-25, and a fellow at the Onassis Foundation. Phoenix studied composition at the Royal Northern College of Music, and she currently performs in freak-folk duo Knowing the Oak Tree, and as part of indie rock band jasmine.4.t.

Following a busy year of commissions in 2024, Phoenix is preparing to embark on a large-scale tour throughout 2025, performing with boygenius member Lucy Dacus and with jasmine.4.t. Ahead of her tour, we caught up with Phoenix to discuss her large-scale commissions, queer Greek mythology, discovering material, the balance between composition and performance, and “composition as spellcraft”…

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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: I first discovered your work through your monodrama ‘Songs of Descent’, a queer retelling of Persephone — which premiered in Manchester and at Tête-à-Tête Festival in London back in 2023. You’ve described this as your “most personal work to date”; tell me a bit about how you conceived the work?

Phoenix Rousiamanis: I started writing ‘Songs of Descent’ in 2020 — I was writing it between 2020 and 2022. It was a very bleak period for me, that one; it was so bleak [that] I can’t remember what happened, for like two years, while I was writing this piece. Obviously, there was lockdown as well… But it just hit me extra hard. So I was going through some shit. I have always been very spiritual, and I started regaining that from 2018; I started to get into a lot of different practices. At the time, I really felt like this story of Persephone really resonated with me — this descent into the underworld, and the ascent after it. I wanted to create a healing narrative, basically.

The thing that really got me into it was the goddess Hecate — the goddess of witchcraft, crossways, doorways, liminal spaces… Everything that’s in-between. She’s a very queer goddess. Some people are gonna think I’m crazy, but I felt a call from her. I really felt that something was going on, she was guiding me. And that’s what she did in the Persephone story. When Persephone was abducted by Hades, Hecate, having dominion over all plains — underworld, earth, and sky — was the only one that could help Demeter find her daughter. She would be the one that guides her in and out of the underworld.

So she represented the strength that you need in these situations, when you feel like you’re going through a descent. She’s like your guide, somehow; that strong, quiet presence that helps you endure it. Because writing ‘Songs of Descent’ was the only thing keeping me staying alive. It was a piece that was very necessary to happen — I needed to write it.

Tell me more about these mythological elements, and how you’ve recontextualised them in the piece’s narrative structure?

It is, in some ways, a very confessional piece — it’s very personal — but it’s dressed under this mythological thing. So I guess it’s allegorical. I’m talking about a lot of things that were in my mind. What happens in the narrative is: Persephone descends to the underworld, and I imagined [that] she comes across a lot of different “monsters” — a lot of different creatures.

They’re not all Greek mythology; some of them are, some of them aren’t. The monsters she comes across [include] a lipless creature, that represented my dysphoria and dysmorphia — this creature that feels really sorry for themselves. The disgustingness of that level of self-pity and self-wallowing. There’s one about a vampire — vampires really fascinate me. I’m fascinated by the idea of excess: if you’re immortal, everything starts becoming boring, and there’s nothing more you can aim for. I was imagining this sexy vampire [who] is greedy, all the time. And then that vampire gets cancelled on Twitter. There’s a lot of fears around cancel culture. I was struggling with OCD at the time; I had lots of very paranoid thoughts, anxiety, that was really relentless. You can feel that in the piece. Out of nowhere, you’ll be fine, and suddenly you’ll feel this drop. There’s a lot of relentlessness, obsessiveness, things coming back — haunting things.

In the narrative, Persephone manages to be compassionate with all these creatures. That’s how, in the end, she’s able to see her past self as a little ghost — so she can be passionate with herself, as well. Especially seeing [that] there’s this element of her being a rape victim, as well; what that does to you. So after she manages to be compassionate with everyone else, being compassionate with herself.

There’s a lot of elements of self-love and self-discovery, I feel, in the ways you’re talking about the narrative.

Yeah. Everything in all the creatures, she can sympathise with. But there’s [only] one reoccurring, really haunting one — the angels. The angels are the only really terrifying ones, because they’re not flawed, they’re perfect. They symbolise this really harsh, objectifying truth, and Christian judgement. They were very inspired by Rilke’s angels — [Rainer Maria] Rilke writes, in his poetry, about angels in a terrifying way. [There’s] something about that whole Christian harshness — you’re born with sin, you’re born to repent. They represent guilt, as well.

Tell me a bit about the compositional process — did the creation of the music feel intuitive to you, or was there a more formal “I’m going to use x material to represent y concept”?

I like giving myself a lot of restrictions. One thing I struggle with is choice paralysis. What I tend to do with my compositional process is, I write a lot, until I find the world I want to craft. I throw a lot of stuff away. But then [through that] I collect a lot of material that I want. I create a very defined sound world. You know when you watch a film and it has a specific colour, you enter a different world when you watch it? I want it to feel like that, you know.

I did have a very specific structure for it. I knew I wanted these reoccurring passages, I knew how long I wanted each movement to be. There’s a lot of reoccurring themes and materials, even if it’s not always visible. So it was very planned out; but the thing that I loved, really loved, about writing a piece that long and really getting lost in one world — is that then, at some point, you can start doing random things. You can do instinctual thing, but you’re so “in the world” — you speak its language — that it somehow makes sense, even if you thought that this wouldn’t make sense. I remember talking to my teacher at the time [and saying], “I don’t know why I made this decision” — and she was saying “when you exist for so long in this world, you just know it.” So towards the end of the writing process, I was able to do a lot of impulsive decisions; but it involved a lot of planning before.

Tell me a bit about your musical background — how did your musical and compositional practice develop? I understand you’ve explored a variety of different musical styles and genres…

It was a combination of [things]. Even though no one in my family — my parents — were doing music [before], my sister is a pianist. She is nine years older than me. When she was 17, she started playing ‘Ondine’ by Ravel, [from] Gaspard de la Nuit — and I just remember hearing her practicing it and being like “what is this witchcraft?” I went and stood next to her at the piano, and I would watch her play it, and then I’d be like “show me how you do it.” -laughs- And obviously, it’s really hard, so I couldn’t do it, because I’d never played the piano before. But then I started making my own shapes — sitting down and noodling on the piano, coming up with things.

The other thing that shaped my music taste was my aunt — [who] was very into a lot of rock music — and also my cousin. Basically, I found this mp3 [player] on a beach when I was like 13, and I didn’t know what music to put on it, so I was like “can you put some music on it?” And she filled it with the whole of Radiohead’s discography, Massive Attack, Björk… and I was like, mindblown. I was very lonely at the time; I didn’t have a lot of friends in my early teens. So I’d listen to music all day, again and again. I got very obsessed.

I was studying a lot of academic music — violin and piano — at the same time. I grew up in Greece, and the music system there is quite old-school with what you learn; harmony, counterpoint, stuff like that. I was very nerdy with that kind of shit.

You’ve got a lot of compositional alter egos — being an electronic artist, performing in a band, alongside composing…

I went to RNCM [Royal Northern College of Music], and for a few years I just composed my own stuff. I wasn’t in any projects like this, but I wanted to [be]. I was making a lot of friends in the pop course and doing little bits and bobs, small jams and stuff like that. And the pop course people got to know me and were like “if we need a violin, we know who we’re getting” — so I ended up being in a lot of projects when I was at conservatoire. I think in my final year, I played in ten pop course recitals; so I was quite involved in all of them. That’s where Sylvette started, as well — which was lovely, I do miss that. I was in a few other projects, as well. I started doing my own electronic music — briefly, I released two tracks under sexwithmdonna.

When I started doing some of that, I was like “okay — I see this lifestyle suiting me.” I really need to be a composer and a performer — I need to be both. I have those two different sides. The composing side is much more domestic, and nerdy, and wants to sit inside and play Bach, and analyse things, write, take time, be quiet… Like a winter thing. Whereas my performing is [like], I can be out — I love the attention, being able to dress up, the drinks afterwards, the persona.

You’ve mentioned that much of your work contains themes of queerness, folklore, and witchcraft — tell me a bit more about how those themes impact your work?

I mean, queerness is always gonna be there. Even if my music isn’t explicitly “queer” — sometimes it is, very loudly, and very political — even if it’s just pure music, it’s still always gonna be queer: you know, it breaks, and shapeshifts, it is a multitude of things at the same time. It’s provocative, it’s colourful, it’s dark and humourous at the same time. All these things are very “sonically queer”.

Witchcraft — the idea of magic — really plays into it. I always think of creating any piece of art as like a spell; you put so much intention into it, so much focus, and you release it out. I really think about the intention — about what I want it to do. With ‘Songs of Descent’, I do feel like I want people to feel healed; it’s really tough, it can be difficult to listen to, it can be uncomfortable, but it’s a healing thing. It’s like a ritual, somehow. I really think about it like that. I’m very interested in folklore — I find so much richness in [it] — and nostalgia. It’s a feeling that I love delving into. I’m always drawn to melancholic sounding things.

Speaking of nostalgia and melancholy — your piece ‘Unfamiliar Flesh’ was performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra last year…

Absolutely. It’s like a quiet melancholy. It’s quite introverted; it’s not in-your-face, it’s not overly dramatic. I’m always very inspired by Miyazaki films for that; they’re so kind of heartbreaking, but nothing really happens. Again, I do think it’s still existing in the tail end of the ‘Songs of Descent’ world, but it’s much more refrained. That was a more instinctual piece; more “I just want to sink into this warm and melancholic feeling, and I’m gonna sit in here for while.” Nothing much is gonna happen — it’s gonna build a bit, but not too much.

There’s something I love about that — there is movement, but it asks you to sit with a feeling, rather than forcing you through anything.

Yeah, exactly. I really don’t think that we need to always be doing things. ‘Songs of Descent’ was very dramatic, it was very –click– idea –click– idea –click– idea — thing, thing, thing. Which can be very captivating. But then I started getting into much more slower-paced music; I started listening to a lot of Feldman, I was obsessed with [his work] last year. Sometimes it’s nice to sit in one thing; you don’t need to do anything else. It makes you notice more things, somehow — because there’s less to notice. Like, it makes you engage, because it’s so subtle; every little change is very impactful. It’s really nice to sink into that.

Alongside writing for the London Philharmonic Orchestra, this past year has seen commissions for WOMEX ’24, Trans Chorus of Los Angeles, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s Ensemble 10:10…

This [past] year has been the most insane composition year… It’s really been so much. I started with the LPO thing — that was my first one for 2024 — then I had this Trans Chorus of Los Angeles [commission]. It was this really odd, five-minute piece for electronics and choir, where it was me asking them questions and them responding. Then I started writing the Ensemble 10:10 piece — which I was very, very happy with. I think it’s one of my best ones. That was quite a big one; it was a 20-minute orchestral piece. I spent a lot of energy on that.

It’s called ‘Places I’m Starting To Forget’. I’m from a small town in rural Greece — very conservative — so I can’t go there anymore. It’s a pondering on my childhood home; how things that were once so intimate to me, really small things — like the wood patterns on this chair — starting to forget them. How that is very bittersweet. On the one hand, there were some really traumatic memories, but [on the other] really beautiful things. That piece is very nostalgic; that piece is nostalgia in a bubble. It’s all about painting specific scenes: like going to my sister’s room, and hearing her play piano, and hearing the church bells outside. We lived on the top of a hill, so you could hear church bells coming from all different parts of the town; you’d get this really beautiful surround-sound bells in different places… Very microtonal kind of thing. That was a lot of the soundtrack of what my childhood was like. It was tapping into a lot of that.

I’d love to hear more about your piece for the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles — I understand you’ve worked with them before this commission?

They sang on this record [I worked on]. This is another project that I’m in — jasmine.4.t — and we recorded her album in LA last December [ed. 2023]. The record came out on 17th January, produced by boygenius — and the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles was featuring on two tracks that I did the arrangements for. We met, and they were like “oh, we’ve got this upcoming concert, we’d love for you to write something” — and I was like “yeah, sure”. It’s a chorus with so many different voices; kind of beautifully un-homogenous. [It’s] also mixed levels — some professional, some amateur — and so many really unique voices in it. I really loved that.

The whole concept is: I’m asking questions, and the text is up to them. Everyone responds with different text, but they have specific pitch[es] given. So you hear this choral mumble. I did something a little bit like that on the [jasmine.4.t] record — this kind of aleatoric-y thing on one of the pieces — and I loved how you can pick out certain voices, and they’re all so beautiful.

Or your ear focuses on certain voices.

Yes. Exactly — it’s kind of simple, they can sing one chord, but it’s so interesting how you hear certain voices.

Alongside your composition work, you’ve also been working on a freak-folk duo under the alias Knowing the Oak Tree, with saxophonist Grace MacDonald. Tell me a bit about how that collaboration came about?

Knowing the Oak Tree started three years ago. Basically, me and Grace lived together in our first year [of] Bachelors. It was really lucky, because we found a really good friend in each other; and also, we liked the same music. We really had the same taste — not in just music, but pop culture, and fashion… we really like the same things. So we really bonded over that. We were always saying “we need to do something together”, and then Grace — being a very organised girlie — was like “right, let’s do this.” She did all the admin, she found the funding, she did everything — and I just had to write silly songs.

You released your debut album last year — was there a specific vision you had with the record? How did the process work for you as a duo?

Grace came up the concept. Grace had a very specific artistic vision, this idea, that she gave me to me and we developed together. She was fascinated by Celtic folklore — that’s her heritage. We were reading a lot of books together, finding different stories that we liked. We really enjoyed the roughness of those stories; the humour in them, as well. We were fascinated by the stories of Deirdre of the Sorrows; the strong female characters, and a lot of queer characters — a lot of shapeshifters. There’s a lot of shapeshifting creatures in that.

We made Spotify playlists to craft the world, and then we did some jamming. For two days, we were just sampling her saxophone — every single sound you can make. That did every layer — harmonic layers, percussion, nearly everything apart from the harp. 90% of the sounds on the album — even if they don’t sound like it — are a saxophone, and most of it is made with samplers. That crafted a nice, cohesive sound world.

So there was a lot of jamming. There was a lot of finding bits of text, a lot of back-and-forth of ideas. Grace is in Switzerland, so I visited [her] quite a bit. Switzerland is quite good at funding things, so it made it possible [for me] to travel down and stay there every few months. We also jokingly say that Knowing the Oak Tree is also an arts and crafts project; because we make little bracelets, and our own customised CDs. We worked with [a] producer, Arina Korenyu; she was amazing. She recorded the whole album. I had a lot of the samples already done, but a lot of the live saxophone, singing, violin, we did with Arina. She produced it beautifully.

In terms of your 2025 plans — I understand you’ll be spending a good part of this year on tour?

I’m gonna be a performer this year. The tour I’m doing this year [is] with Lucy Dacus. She’s a singer-songwriter, she’s also in boygenius. I’m basically in her band! I recorded on her album, which is coming out in March — playing violin, keys, and doing BVs, as well. It’s like a US-Mexico-Europe-UK tour, it’s gonna be quite long. But also, on some of the tour — on the first month of the US dates — jasmine.4.t is supporting, so I’m doing double shows. I also have some other dates this year with Jasmine. So that’s this year’s plan.

How separate do you feel you need to keep those two sides of yourself — as a composer and as a performer?

It’s one or the other for me. I can have little ideas, little glimpses, but I can’t compose. I need to not speak to anyone. I need quiet, I need no one to disturb me… -laughs- I can’t have anything else in the day — ideally, nothing in the week — so I can sit and do it, you know? I can’t do a little bit each day, that’s not how it works for me.

It’s very disorganised, as well. Because I throw away so much stuff… Sometimes, I’ll start something else, or I’ll have a tight deadline, and a lot of discarded material has come back and has been used. Weirdly, a lot of the Knowing the Oak Tree album had older material [where] I was like “oh, this is perfect for here!” — so I do recycle material. It is good to really make sure you are holding on to everything, in some form. Even if it’s just a voice note. [I have] millions of voice notes; I record them all the time. Sometimes I’ll hum something, sometimes I’ll explain something — mostly, it’s just me on the piano.

Being on the road for the majority of 2025 — is there anything you’re particularly looking to gain creatively?

As I said, I’m a performer for 2025. The problem is, when you’re doing both… To be a performer, and to be doing it properly, you need to be doing it every day. It’s a sport, and you need to train. I’m looking forward to getting back into that — being a bit more of an athlete with it — practicing every day, and getting very close to the instrument. Sometimes, you lose that closeness, so I’m looking forward to that. The past few years have [seen] so many different things; different projects, performing and composing, teaching, a million different things happening at the same time. So I’ve had to divide myself. I’m looking forward to it being kind of a straightforward year, in terms of “I only need to do this tour” — this is the only thing I’m doing.

I am hoping that [the tour] will make me really impatient to do it [compose] again; I’m hoping it will really make me very hungry for it. I do feel that by the end of last year, I kind of gave it my all — I had no juices left — and still now, if you’re like “write something”, I might be like “I literally can’t, I’ve written too much”. So I’m hoping to recharge that. I always find that taking long breaks is quite good for composition; you always come back at it fresh. I always feel rusty when I come back to it, and I need to throw away a lot of stuff, try a lot of things. But I always feel like I have a slightly refreshed perspective on things.

You’ve worked on a variety of different musical projects, both as composer and performer, in a wide range of styles and genres. How important are genre distinctions — or the lack thereof — to your own musical outlook?

They’re not important to me. I don’t see genre as that important. I’ve always listened to things like Björk, where with a lot of it, you can’t tell: “is this contemporary classical music, is it electronics, is it pop?” So I do love that. I’m not fussed at all about putting things into a genre, having them neatly packed away. I would more think about the kind of piece I want to make outside genre; it’s more the means that I have, the forces that I’m writing for, the process.

I definitely have things that I wanna do. I want to do longer instrumental pieces that are not in chapters, I want to try that out for sure. I kind of want to do more piano music, as well. I feel like I have a lot of piano music in me that I could write down, make a collection; I have a few piano pieces that haven’t been played. I definitely want to do another dramatic work at some point. I kinda wanna write a string quartet; that’s something in my mind that I feel like I’d want to do. I used to play in a string quartet, and I used to find it hard to write for one — because I was too familiar with repertoire, I was too close to it. It’s like, having been too close to the instruments and ensemble, you start writing a bit like a performer. Which can be fine, but can lack a bit of perspective.

I want to do more curating. The thing we did with ‘Songs of Descent’ in Manchester was: there was the piece, and then I curated an afterparty with DJs. I really love doing that, because 80% of the people there were people who had never seen any sort of classical music — contemporary or not — and they really got into it. It’s more accessible, somehow; it attracts a bigger range of people.

I’ve always felt this — with so much of what we do, we have such a responsibility to reach out to people outside of the so-called contemporary music “bubble”. Reach different people with different interests and perspectives.

Exactly. Especially [if] there’s an afterparty afterwards; you can dance around, you can drink, you can do whatever. You know, you think about how music was played in parties… I find it weird going to a concert and not hanging out. It feels empty. I really think that a lot of what we do — a lot of music — should be social. It’s part of the social experience.

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Learn more about Phoenix and her practice at:

• https://ph-rousiamanis.squarespace.com/
• https://soundcloud.com/phoenix-rousiamanis
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoVqVbnbPVEEBTO7cjw62MQ
• https://www.instagram.com/phoenix_rousiamanis/

Catch Phoenix on tour this year with Lucy Dacus and jasmine.4.t:

• https://www.lucydac.us/tour/
• https://www.jasmine4t.com/

References/Links:

• Rilke’s Terrifying Angels (2017), Poets Online
• Maurice Ravel – Gaspard de la Nuit, No. 1, ‘Ondine’ (1908-1909)
• John Millington Synge – Deirdre of the Sorrows (1909)