[audio:Desaxe-sample-for-MATA.mp3|titles=excerpt from Desaxe|artists=Nouvel Ensemble Modern, Loraine Vaillancourt, conductor]Born in Athens in 1978, Nicolas studied guitar with Evangelos Assimakopoulos and harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Yiannis Ioannidis, as well as composition under Theodore Antoniou.He moved to Paris in 2002 where he pursued his studies in composition with Michel Merlet at the Ecole Normale de Musique. He is currently finishing his Master's degree in computer-aided composition at the university of Paris-8 under the direction of Horacio Vaggione and Jose Manuel Lopez-Lopez, and is taking composition classes with Philippe Leroux at the CRD of Blanc-Mesnil. Furthermore, since September 2007 he has been studying musical theatre composition with Georges Aperghis at the Hochschule der Kunste, in Bern, Switzerland.He has taken part in composition master classes with, Brian Ferneyhough, Francois Paris and Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as computer music seminars at the IRCAM.His music has been performed in France, Greece, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Great Britain, the USA, Canada, Peru, South Korea, and has been selected and awarded in competitions worldwide (Greece, Italy, USA, South Korea, France, Austria).In Semptember 2009, he will attended the IRCAM Cursus 1 on computer music.
