Review
This
album, the second major project to emerge from the Nemo laboratory, presents
Vangelis in scientific mood. It contains a varied selection of high-energy
tracks, probably the reason why the two big tunes, ‘Pulstar’
and ‘Alpha’, almost invariably
appear on Vangelis compilation albums. They also must have caught the ear of
Carl Sagan, who later used these plus tracks from other albums for his Cosmos
TV-series. Like its predecessor ‘Heaven
and Hell’ this album was followed by a concert in 1977, this time in the
Royal Festival Hall.
The very striking opening track ‘Pulstar’
with its elaborate percussion and shrill keyboard outbursts for a long time
remained in Vangelis’ concert-repertoire, each time in a different
arrangement. ‘Freefall’ (slightly
Arabic mood) and ‘Mare
Tranquillitatis’ (site of the first landing on the moon) are typical of
the cold but adventure-filled “Moon Base Alpha” or ”Blake’s 7” sort of
atmosphere on the album. The longer tracks ‘Main
Sequence’ and ‘Nucleogenesis’ are both jazzy sorts of improvisations with
Vangelis banging away on the drums and the latter also featuring a rather
austere church-organ. In-between we find two melodic pieces, the slightly baroque
‘Orion’ and ‘Alpha’,
which of course is an all-time great Vangelis classic, simple yet profound and
very well orchestrated in its gradual build-up. A speaking clock is used
imaginatively at a few places on the album and the potentially unremarkable
summing up of Earth-related physical constants by engineer Keith Spencer-Allen
in the closing track manages to achieve a great climax by having the harmonic
resolution coincide neatly with the final constant: the Albedo number.
A fine album indeed – the analog synths may sound a bit ancient nowadays and
the depletion of the Earth’s ozone layer may have shifted the Albedo value of
0.39 a bit after all these years, but the music still achieves the maximum 1.0
Krugozor
In 1982 issue #10
appeared of a Soviet Union publication called “Krugozor”, which drew
attention to various forms of music (folk, classical) and also contained this
small article about Vangelis:
One Man Orchestra
Two Greek performers of popular music have
achieved much recognition over the past decade, and gained an
"international reputation" - Demis Roussos and Vangelis
Papathanassiou. It would seem they have little in common, one of them a stage
singer, the other a serious composer and arranger, a real master of electronic
and acoustic keyboards. Nevertheless for five years they were part of one band
called "Aphrodite's Child". The band was created in 1968 by the young
Greek musicians, living as immigrants in Paris in opposition to the regime of
the "black colonels". Many creations of this original ensemble,
especially the songs "Rain and Tears" and "It's Five
O'Clock" were very successful and still haven't been forgotten today. One
of their most interesting projects, the oratorio "666", was first
performed in 1972, shortly before the band disintegrated. Keyboard-player
Vangelis Papathanassiou, having dismissed the band, began to write symphonic
works and music for films. Only in 1975 he returned to the stage simply as
Vangelis. Record-company RCA, for which the musician had signed a contract,
decided that his surname Papathanassiou was very difficult and that presenters
of music programmes wouldn't pronounce it correctly. Since then Vangelis has
written more than half a dozen albums, among them "Albedo 0.39",
"Spiral", "Beaubourg" and others, on which all instrumental
parts are being played by him. Vangelis is considered one of the best
keyboard-players in the world. His works, compared to those of other electronic
music performers, distinguish themselves by having first of all bright melodies
and very full compositions saturated with various intonations from folklore.
Secondly, the harmonious originality of his music makes Vangelis draw the
attention of many arrangers. In particular, the piece "Pulstar", also
in this issue (*), was included in the repertoire of the “Polja Moria”
orchestra. The last two years were especially successful regarding his musical
biography. He wrote two vocal albums together with well-known singer and
lyricist Jon Anderson. So after one decade, he has returned to writing simple
forms of song again. And at the end of 1981 Vangelis received an honorable
Grammy award for his music for the "Chariots of Fire" movie,
recognized as the best film-music of the year.
A. Troytsky
(*)
on one of the blue flexi-discs that came with the issue.
By Ivar de Vries
Movements