Minos Matsas

Biography

Minos Matsas (Athens, 6 September 1968) is a Greek composer, lyricist and producer. He is the grandson of the founder of the record company Minos EMI. One of his grandmothers was from Constantinople, the other from Thessaloniki and his grandfather, Minos, from Ioannina. He was born into a musical family with a tradition of recording alive and with a father who was at the moment of his great creation. His father, Makis, had him in the studio with him from the age of five. Minos Matsas expressed a desire to learn classical guitar from an early age and thus very soon became the center of his young singing group. He received a degree from the Athens Conservatory and the Juilliard School. When he began writing his first compositions, he did not want anyone to know about it. However, he developed into a self-sufficient composer, one of the most important of his generation. In 1994, Minos Matsas composed his first cycle of songs entitled One Thousand and One Nights Again, with lyrics by Akos Daskalopoulos. In 1995, four of his compositions were included in the multi-album album by George Dalaras, Welcome to Them. From 2000 to 2011, he lived in the United States of America. As a composer, he has dozens of films to his credit, theatrical performances, and television programs. He has collaborated, among others, with director Costas Gavras on the film The Parthenon, as well as on the performances of Aristophanes' Birds and Irene, which were staged at the ancient theater of Epidaurus. He has also won awards at the Thessaloniki Film Festival (for Eduart and Slaves in Their Chains). He also wrote the music for the film Undisputed III: Redemption (2010). In 2016, he composed the original text of Woyzeck by Georg Büchner. In 2017, the soundtrack for Yannis Sakaridis' second feature film Amerika Square, based on the multi-award-winning novella by Yannis Tsirpas, Victoria Does Not Exist.