Across time & space: The Thread by Russell Maliphant and Vangelis

All stills are from the trailer of The Thread

The Sadler's Wells dance production The Thread has set out, with its central concept of the mythological thread, to explore "changing forms of traditional Greek dance" via the choreography of Russell Maliphant and the music composed especially for this production by Vangelis.

Such opus then needed a composer who could seamlessly move between, and even combine, ancient and modern, demolishing any boundaries in our perceptions of what musical elements are supposed to be rooted in what frame of time and space.

If one needed another demonstration of how Vangelis is able to compose music that transcends many historic periods' and geographic areas' musical tradition, then the score for The Thread is certainly one.

Naturally, in the introduction to the video presentation that premiered on 17 April 2020, his soundtracks for Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire got a mention, but here we are in a musical world that is more familiar to those who know his extensive and impossibly multi-faceted discography, which spans a seemingly absurd range of genres and styles.

The video is based on the world premiere, which took place in spring 2019 - and it was streamed, then later made available for one week on the dance company's Youtube channel.

The opening, with its drone, its subdued percussive sounds, and evolving ancient-but-futuristic sounding melodic motifs reminds us of the overture to his El Greco studio album (not the soundtrack of same title).

This, and some other sections of the score, are reaching a level of pure beauty that is often hard to process even without the imagery. A few notes from the by-now characteristic and instantly recognisable harp-like synthesizer sounds Vangelis used in the soundtrack to the epic movie Alexander can conjure a sense of immense serenity, timeless beauty - and the dancers seem to be floating on the sound waves...

The lighting design adds to the superlative choreography by Russell Maliphant: the lights create virtual spaces, sometimes splitting up the dancers into separate scenes, producing ever-changing staging of the movements. During the meditative third section of the score, the lighting design and the camerawork create something that is an audiovisual bliss - its purity and simplicity is mesmerising.

In other sections of the score, Vangelis makes us feel as if Mother Earth is pulsating with some ancient rhythm, menacing at times, animating and life-affirming at other times. If we recall Asma Asmaton from the album Rapsodies, well, those very pulsations seem to be now emerging from some unimaginably deep geological structure buried under the stage... and they reverberate outward, after animating the dancers, with the waves dying off somewhere at the peripheries of our known Universe...

This is what it means to think in sounds, not in genres, not in styles, not in preconceived boundaries of time and space.

Sampled whirls of sounds, ancient woodwinds, organic woodwinds of long gone millennia, and Earth-shattering percussion are all coming together in the ballet's most animated sections. However, after every unleashing of thundering forces, we have a chance to recompose ourselves.

The emotional effect of going from Alexander-like percussive passages to the serenity of achingly beautiful harmonies (which remind us of the unique musical world of the albums Odes and Rapsodies) is similar to a feeling of gently dissolving in some caressing wash of sound waves.

The range of the musical concept is, simply put, phenomenal.

We go from minimalist, completely stripped-down elements to towering sonic constructs, from the sound of some ancient gathering in immemorable times to Byzantine celebrations of life forces to somewhere in the outer realms of the Cosmos.

Is it the sound of an ancient army gathering or just a distant fete in some settlement impossibly far from us in space and time?

Are those drums or are those tectonic plates colliding, volcanic forces throbbing under them?

Is that a synthesizer, a sampled and processed ancient instrument, or an ethnic acoustic instrument that we listen to through some immersive voyage in a time machine?

Are those ancient flutes' sound reaching us through some labyrinth of caves, which managed to hide from us for millennia? Or is that some imaginative use of state of the art electronics?

Does it matter?

Vangelis has always said, and this is why people classifying him as an electronic artist are consistently wrong:  he does not care where the sounds come from. Due to the possibilities of technology, he just happens to utilise many electronic instruments to achieve the sound colours he imagines.

The Thread is, and remains, another perfect example of that ethos...


Credits: Artistic conception from Georgia Iliopoulou; lighting by fellow Sadler’s Wells Associate Artist, the “choreographer of light”, Michael Hulls; costume design by award-winning London-based Greek fashion designer, Mary Katrantzou.

The quarantine waves...

Although one tries to resist the temptation for days and weeks, as the lockdown continues one eventually caves in... and posts a "quarantine playlist" of albums that seem to have originated from some other dimension, or have reached us via some electromagnetic waves emitted in some distant galaxy... or emerged from the habitat of previously not noticed tiny organisms.

Thus, on a personal note, a choice of a few albums that might just take someone else, too into the waves and vibrations of vast or infinitesimally small worlds.

The playlist is perhaps manageable in a single sitting (or, actually, lying...), but it needs a very quiet day with quite a few hours to just... be...

1. Tangerine Dream - Zeit 

Among the early, nowadays we would call it ambiental, albums by the veritable electronic music institution that Tangerine Dream has been since the 1960s, we have this double LP dating back almost fifty years...

The reason why I keep returning to this double album is that it is perhaps the most convincing example of 'space ambient'. What I understand and expect under that over-used label is music that simply seems to exist, without feeling that it is being performed by human beings, that there are instruments of any kinds involved in the process.

Zeit simply exists. It fills every available space in the room, in the house, it flows, it changes, it has currents and undulations. There are no shapes to hold on to, there are no structures to be self-conscious about.

It just is...

Yet, unlike many ambient drone music albums, it is constantly changing below its sometimes static-looking surface.

It is almost as if something, someone has managed to transpose into audible frequency range some radio telescope recording of the various electromagnetic activities spotted in distant galaxies.

2. Vangelis - Soil Festivities

On a quiet day, after a lengthy introduction via the sound waves and undercurrents of Zeit, the Greek grand master's mid-1980s concept album is immersing us into a very different world.

We go from the immense and the eminently "macro" to the delicate "micro" world, albeit latter is a very definitely terrestrial one.

Despite occasional sounds of summer storms and rain, this remains a phenomenal combination of minimalism and ambient music.

The delicate, obstinately repeating tiny motifs develop, constantly evolve, and get embellished by a discourse, sometimes a whole multi-party conversation, of other musical elements.

It could be the musical expression of the life of myriad tiny creatures in a rainforest on Earth, but it could equally be anywhere on some exotic other planet teeming with life. The pace of the musical evolution is hypnotising, the whole album has a dream-like quality whilst it seduces the mind with myriad, infinitesimal or large-scale, changes in the musical textures.

Speaking of textures, it is worth paying attention to just how every single synthesized timbre is chosen from the infinite possibilities of Vangelis's sonic laboratory - and how each timbre blends perfectly into the ever-evolving delicate textures.

Sublime, passionate at time, and precise in its dosing of musical energies... an album that is a very unusual and, to this day, unique interlude in the synth master's astoundingly varied output.

3. Michael Stearns - Encounter

The superlative American maestro of space ambient and world music-infused ambiental music has created something that is a rare example of thematic space music.

However, theme and track titles aside, one scandalous way to listen to this album is to not care about the intended narrative that wants to describe an encounter with an advanced alien civilisation.

We return to the world of Zeit, but here we have sometimes vast and thundering forces unleashed... the walls may wobble and neighbours in the street could wonder whether a UFO is actually in the process of landing somewhere.

There are many trademark elements in the compositional and sound design thinking that went into this Stearns album - characteristics that later we recognise in his masterpieces like the soundtracks to Ron Fricke's spellbinding Baraka or Samsara.

There are textures that shimmer and oscillate in mid-air in the room, there are huge floods of cosmic energies that storm through the room and fly off into the distance, leaving us stunned and mesmerised.

During this sonic voyage, we don't travel to distant galaxies, the Cosmos drops by for a visit...

4. Tangerine Dream - Rubycon

Just after their seminal Phaedra album, this one can leave one wondering whether it is the music of intricate inner or outer spaces.

It is, in its two tracks, a hypnotic voyage into some otherworldly spaces that seem to be at the same time cosmic and microscopic.

Maybe this is quantum music, that the late mastermind Edgar Froese talked about many decades later.

There is structure, there are tightly timed pulsations of impossible to grasp physical forces between particles, there are myriad infinitesimally tiny details and shifts in the forces at work... and there is, at the same time, complete fluidity and a sense of timelessness.

Like Soil Festivities, this seems to deep dive into a microworld - but this is not at the level of tiny living creatures, it is way, way below that.

We are listening to subatomic particles shaping up the vast constructs we see through telescopes...

5. Carbon Based Lifeforms - Twentythree

Unlike their pure ambient drone album VLA, this multi-part album has a rare combination of highly cerebral and emotive space ambient music.

It is a very rare experience, after having gone through many decades' output in aforementioned genre, to find something that is so abstract, so devoid of any tangible shape, but at the same time so emotionally charged.

The subtle melancholy of tracks like Held Together By Gravity is sublime and simply beautiful...

Although the creative duo, as we all know, is capable of thundering beats and trendy psy-trance vibes, too, this album is a phenomenally delicate affair.

Despite some of the track titles, which may be pointing us toward Earthly mysteries, we are in outer space... or, at best, in some caves nobody else has yet discovered.

The music gives us something to hold onto, there are tiny shapes we can see in the gaseous clouds, but it gives enough space for imagination to wonder. We can imagine whatever we want, especially if we do not look at the track titles.

6. John Serrie - The Stargazer's Journey

A relatively tiny journey to the American continent can keep us firmly in the sphere of utterly cosmic, but delicately emotive, space ambient.

One of the masters of space electronica from the other side of the Atlantic has this quite exquisite constellation hiding in his discography. It is recent, it is from the new Millennium, but, in a good sense, it sounds like the most stellar 1970s-1980s achievements of space music.

The entire sonic landscape has some intangible gentle melancholy, a sense of one dreaming to be somewhere else in some distant corner of the Cosmos, but at the same time feeling nostalgic about one's own home world.

To sculpt every sound and every transition between what seem to be undulations of gentle clouds of particles, but to make it all feel so fluid, effortless, and without tangible human intervention... well, we are back to the world of Zeit.

If Zeit started us off with the hidden vibrations and currents of indescribable cosmic interactions that exist and will continue to exist independently from us, The Stargazer's Journey is a slow flight among gas nebulae that trigger emotions in us by their, dare we say, otherworldly beauty.

In today's world, where music has been increasingly put into utilitarian pigeonholes (i.e. music meant to relax us, to heal us, to entertain us etc.), we ended up being extremely distant from the Pythagorean ideal of what the 'music of the spheres' is supposed to be.

Serrie's album is a good counterpoint. Yes, it can instantly relax us from it first few seconds, but it is something that defies expectations on what a 'space music' composer sets out to do and why...