Vangelis

Vangelis was an early find, gleaned from hanging out at the Seatlle Laserium. I was so infatuated with Laserium at that stage – both because of their pure color and geometric precision (and I hadn’t even tried drugs yet) and their mind-opening soundtracks – that I spent an entire summer and all the money I earned from it trying to photograph the shows. Although not foolish enough to try to use a flash, I could never get the combination of shutter speed and aperture anywhere near correct and ended up with hundreds of black photos. One day when I was there early for a show, the, um, laserist was playing some great swirling electronic music, and I asked him what it was, and he showed me the cover of Vangelis’ Spiral album. I immediately put my camera away and spent the money I was going to use to process the film on buying that album.

Spiral is an interesting album, resting as it does between Vangelis’ early explorations of mood and timbre (on albums like Heaven and Hell and Albedo 0.39) and his more classically-oriented compositions on later albums such as Opera Sauvage or China. There are five tracks on the album, all of them quite long, and they all unfold slowly using a repeating motif and embellished it with different electronic textures. They’re all rather like Ravel’s Bolero, a meandering, prototypical minimalist piece that is really an exercise in arrangement and orchestral color and dynamics.

This was all virgin territory to me, and I ate it up like a starving man. Vangelis was more like the meandering watery soundscapes of Jean-Michel Jarre than the tightly constructed sequencing of Synergy, but they each had their own signature sounds and styles and I was unimaginably excited by all of them. I used to lie on the floor with my headphones on listening to the unfolding pieces and staring at the cover of Spiral, a twisting headphone jack floating in the sky, and let my mind wander and my body disappear into some nameless, futurist place, filled with the warmth of music and the coolth of electronics.

Encouraged by Spiral, I went out and bought Albedo 0.39, which I also liked quite a bit. More moody than Spiral, Albedo 0.39 careened from full bore proto-techno of Pulstar to the dreamy, sci-fi spaciness of the title track. The entire album is meant to conjure the majesty and mystery of space – a task singularly suited to electronic music – and succeeds admirably. The title track is the most evocative, with moody, floating soundscapes shifting underneath a narrator dispassionately listing attributes of the earth (such as “mean orbital eccentricity”) and ending with its albedo, or reflection index. A perfect mirror would have an albedo of 1 and a black hole would have an albedo of 0, and, apparently, Earth has an albedo of 0.39.

My other early Vangelis purchase was 1979’s China, which found him turning towards more classically structured pieces, and even introducing some acoustic instruments into his electronic scores. This piece is the opener of the album, and I love the way it blows in like firecrackers exploding on Chinese New Year before settling down to a steady synthetic four beat on which to hang the rest of the song. Needless to say, the music on China – and on this piece – isn’t really Chinese, but meant to evoke China to Western ears.

When I was working for the fledgling Fine Living network and helping them define their visual style, I was asked to cut a travel show opening so other production companies could see what they were aiming for. That episode focused on an African safari, and they wanted me to use some exciting African music to set the pace. So, I did. I found a great sunny piece of Afropop in the stock music library and cut together a flashy opening. I had hopes that they would like it, although the cynic in me was just waiting for their reaction. Sure enough, the cynic was right. They liked the visuals and everything, and the music was certainly energetic enough, but they were hoping for something a little more “African” sounding. I assured them that the track I used was authentically African, but they rejected it. “No, no, you know African music”. My hopes crashed again, and the cynic told me that he told me so. Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. You mean ooga-booga darkest continent cannibal headhunter kind of music. In other words, racist, stereotyped, Disney-fied impressions of what African music is, which is entirely inauthentic and insulting. I found a track like that and they loved it and I withdrew my application to work with them. It’s like when my friend Geoff was editing a show featuring a black opera singer building a Japanese meditation studio and the producer wanted him to score it with, what else?, jazz. It’s a drag working for idiots.

Like most of the musicians I was listening to, Vangelis was one person, the impressively named Evangelos Odyssey Papthanassiou. It occurs to me now that I learned early on that you could create an entire world of music by yourself by listening to these electronic musical pioneers, which is in direct opposition from the way that the vast majority of music is created, and which set certain ideals and prejudices about self-sufficiency into my early creative life. With enough discipline and talent, you could do it alone, you could create an entire world that was beholden to nobody but you. For better or worse, those are ideals I still hold today.

Most people know about Vangelis because of a scheduling problem. Beatle wannabee (wannabeatle?) Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra was originally tapped to do the music for Chariots of Fire, but they dropped out, so Vangelis filled the void. Even though his electronic score to the film celebrating British runners in the 1930s is wildly anachronistic, and doesn’t really hold up very well, it somehow captured the popular imagination and the main title music became a worldwide hit – one of the few instrumentals that ever make it onto the charts. It’s pleasant enough, and indelibly linked to the image of men in white running in slow motion on the beach, but it doesn’t rank with his best work. It did, however, lead him to a job that did, and that was scoring Ridley Scott’s classic (over-rated) sci-fi film, Blade Runner. His electronic textures and melodic sense matched perfectly with Scott’s dystopian fantasy, and became an inseparable element of the film. Unfortunately, for reasons unknown to me, the soundtrack wasn’t released for over a decade after the film came out, with a bastardized orchestral version of the music “written by Vangelis” in the stores with the release of the film. Who cares if it’s written by Vangelis? It needs to be played by him to count. That’s the thing with a lot of electronic musicians – their music is largely inseparable from their realization of it. Synergy played by anybody but Larry Fast wouldn’t be the same. Likewise with Jarre and Vangelis. It is so much more than the notes, which becomes painfully clear when somebody other than them interprets their music. Although it was clearly not his fault (I guess), the faux Blade Runner soundtrack spoiled Vangelis for me, and after that, I wandered off to explore other avenues.