The sage of sonic Universes: R.I.P. Vangelis (1943-2022)

 

A kid, aged eight and a half, is mesmerised by an episode of something called Cosmos, made by a superb scientist (Carl Sagan) he never heard of, airing on the national TV channel of a Communist country in the grips of a dictator, at the end of the 1970s... 

To see this on the propaganda-saturated, unwatchable TV channel, which was only airing anything for a few hours per day, was a stunning experience in itself. 

But the little kid got hooked, quasi-obsessed, with the main theme of the series. The stars and galaxies were flowing in the vast Cosmos, accompanied by a piano motif, then the music built into an orchestral and electronic ocean, finishing off with celestial choirs...

It was nothing the kid heard before and it was, at the same time, Earthly, passionate, sublime, and otherworldly. Somebody called Vangelis was listed as composer. 

In 2022, an almost fifty-one year old former kid, with vast music collection ranging from 12th century Early Music to space ambient electronica, is in disbelief... as the man who triggered his interest in music that transcends any categorisation, any temporal and spatial limit, is gone. 

Vangelis Papathanassiou, the Greek composer, multi-instrumentalist, pioneer of synthesizer music of a unique kind, has passed away aged 79 in France, on the 17 May 2022. 

The obituaries inundating the international press at the moment, hours after the announcement, are making ostinato-like repeated references to his Oscar winning film score for Chariots of Fire, to his era-defining and endlessly imitated, sub-genre creating soundtrack to the legendary Blade Runner, to his trailblazing years in the prog rock band Aphrodite's Child, to his collaborations with myriad musicians, to his many other soundtrack works.

But there are aspects of his life and music that even in 2022 are unique or, at best, very seldom found in contemporary music. 

Vangelis never cared about what instruments made the unimaginable range of sounds he used. He stated many times that he "happened" to use synthesizers as he just found it easier to create the previously unheard sounds he imagined. He thoroughly rejected the terms electronic music or electronic musician - these labels, as his discography proves, were meaningless. 

He proved that not the tools, but their uses matter - synthesizers never sounded so warm, passionate, epic as in his creations at a time where countless others were diving into electronic styles that put the technology at the centre. Some to this day rage endless debates online about nonsensical sub-divisions of synthesizer categories and define themselves by the tools they use. Vangelis was and remained the antithesis of all that.

Vangelis never cared about genres - and could instinctively inhabit, recreate, convey the spirit of countless historic periods and ethnic tradisions. Time and space seized to exist, countless ancient traditions, styles, genres and sub-genres met seamlessly in his music... As Ridley Scott once said, Vangelis could effortlessly sound Medieval and contemporary at the same time. 

And here comes the clencher. 

The man who composed everything from progressive rock to jazz and jazz rock, from African tribal music to Celtic ballads, from Far Eastern lullabies to space ambient, from Medieval choral and instrumental music to fiery and Earth-shattering cosmic electronic epics... never formally learnt music, never read or wrote music. 

His Direct system invented in the later 80s allowed him even more what he was doing before: largely improvised creations emanated from his sonic wonderland... with zero regard to the contorted artificial categorisations the music press tried to squeeze his compositions into. 

His discography is impossible, it cannot exist - yet it does. Not long ago this blog posted a quick "inventory" of the utterly mindblowing range of styles, genres, and sub-genres he composed in.

It could not have been composed by one man, it is just impossible that a single person could span millennia and tens of thousands of miles of musical traditions and styles. Yet it was composed by a formally never musically trained man. 

What it meant to listen to his musical Universe during a Communist dictatorship, as a sonic escapism filled with wonder, is impossible to describe for the former little kid who got blown away by the main theme from Cosmos. 

What it meant in subsequent decades to discover the truly limitless sonic Universe Vangelis could create... is also impossible to describe.

May He rest in peace, reunited with the music of the Universe, which, as he often humbly said, was merely channeled by him. He maintained that he never composed anything... he just managed to hear what the Universe was creating.

Thank you, Grand Master of wondrous sounds. 

The Master of sonic galaxies: R.I.P. Klaus Schulze

 

Klaus Schulze, a truly unique trailblazer, a relentless musical innovator with colossal discography filled with superhuman epic journeys through galaxies of sounds... has died on 26 April 2022. 

It is an over-used expression, but in His case, true to the letter: a unique mind, a unique spirit, a unique musician. To the very end, despite his colossal achievements, he remained charming, gentle, even self-parodising, with a lucid and stunningly honest view of his own artistic achievements.

My "first" was the impossible to describe or even grasp Timewind, when I was almost 14 - and it was something literally out of this world, it was like nothing ever heard or imagined to hear ever. It was the start of decades of excited discoveries. 

It was something that taught me: there is music that breaks every convention, every preconception - it just emanates from the fabric of the Universe, it surrounds you, it evolves and it cannot be poured into words chosen by a feeble ordinary human mind. One just had to surrender oneself to it and embark on a journey beyond journeys.

So a huge thanks for many decades of just superhuman meditations, of sound worlds that just came into being and evolved with myriad scintillating details. 

An era has ended - not just in electronic music. If Yannis Xenakis in his avantgarde and seminal Musique Formelle talked about galaxies of sounds, when modeling mathematically musical events, well, Klaus Schulze created those with pure human spirit and emotion.

He made impossible music possible - and instantly recognisable as something coming out of His studio, His mind. 

Even his collaborations are stellar, and out of this world. Who would have thought Lisa Gerrard's vocal improvisations will meet in something truly unique with the electronic Grand Master's improvisations? Or that Wolfgang Tiepold's phenomenal and heartfelt cello improvisations would blend with intricate electronics so well? And then we have Ash Ra Tempel, we have Tangerine Dream at the beginnings, to name just a few more giants of the musical landscape.

May He rest in peace and travel among unimaginable galaxies of sounds of a very special Universe he managed to give us glimpses of.

Farewell to a sound perfectionist - On Florian Schneider's passing

It is difficult to write more than the acres of eulogies that have been written on the passing of the co-founder of Kraftwerk, Florian Schneider, at the age of 73.

Thus, one could try a completely different and personal angle instead.

When I first heard Kraftwerk's track Spacelab, I was in my early teens in Ceausescu's communist dictatorship. As there were only a few hours of mostly propaganda-filled TV each day, Saturday evenings were special... There was a 30-minutes-long show called Teleenciclopedia, which was popularising science - and one of its slots was about astronomy and space exploration.

They used a lot of electronic music, which was considered ideologically "safe" and clean, also, the music of the future. For the aesthetic promoted by the propaganda machinery, electronic music was a progressive genre, and usually was significantly less censored than rock, pop, or even classical music was. How ironic it was to have eminently humanist musical creations embraced by the dehumanising totalitarian propaganda, by ideologists who completely misunderstood what the music was about...

So that TV show put me in contact with instrumental electronic music, as they used sections of synthesizers-based tracks... Kraftwerk was one of the electronic legends that made me perk up.

Although their aesthetic was carefully crafted to point to Earth, humans, and, among other things, the dehumanising potential of technology, it was wonderful escapism for me. They could point out what technology could do to human society, but they were not dystopian - quite the opposite really, and often even with subtle humour and irony.

Food rationing, the dangers of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person in the wrong place, the repeated power cuts, endless propaganda in every media, freezing cold class rooms due to heroic savings on heating and electricity were an indescribable opposite to the electronic music sometimes heard on radio and TV.

For me, Kraftwerk was not space music, like Tangerine Dream and some of the 1970s albums by Vangelis were. It was about us, society, and Earth - but it shared a certain sense of melancholy that I liked in the aforementioned electronic legends' music.

It was about another world, whilst rooted in ours. It was about another time, whilst firmly rooted in the era in which the albums were created. Heck, even their album covers for me were phenomenal, as they self-consciously borrowed from the visual language of e.g. Soviet propaganda.

Who can forget the cover of The Man Machine? Many in the "West" didn't realise just how precise and telling the graphic design choices were, from the font to the poses and the colour scheme... We, in the "East", instantly recognised the language from posters all too familiar to us.

To say that Schneider and Kraftwerk were visionaries, well, it would be a much over-used understatement.

They showed me that it is possible to be immensely erudite, technological, compose music about a world of "robots" even, in strict and wide sense, too - but at the same time to be emotional under the surface, and create a truly unique high-tech melancholia. Nobody sounded like Kraftwerk - it was robotic on the surface, but deeply human under the surface.

Also, it was a complete antithesis of the communist propaganda's vision about a technological future. Latter was utterly dehumanised, with complete erosion of individuality... Kraftwerk depicted a downright romantic vision, even when they poked at the darker effects of technology. As robotic as their constructed imagery and performances may have been, the music was about the humans inhabiting the ultra-technological world of the future...

From their light and immensely popular tracks, which smashed up the walls around "laboratory" electronica and blasted it into popular mainstream, to the deeply atmospheric and philosophical compositions like the trailblazing Autobahn or Numbers, the list of era-defining works could go on and on.

Yes, era-defining as much as they were capturing the zeitgeist of respective eras... They even played with our perceptions and interpretations, one key example of double entendre being the track Radioactivity from the album with same title.

Schneider's attention to detail, technical inventiveness, conceptual thinking, and, of course, boundless imagination, has shaped even genres we would never associate with electronic music of any kind.

As he put it, "We have played and been understood in Detroit and in Japan, and that’s the most fascinating thing that could happen. Electronic music is a kind of world music. I think that the Global Village is coming.”

May you be now, for all eternity, in the realm of phenomenally intricate sounds of the Cosmos... Rest in peace...

The passing of a visionary: Alan R. Pearlman, founder of ARP

Alan R. Pearlman, founder of, and creative genius behind, ARP Instruments has died on 6 January, aged 93.

Even as a student, after the 2nd World War he was dreaming of electronic instruments that could be real musical instruments for musicians, instead of laboratory curiosities. When he founded ARP Instruments, he started to put his dream into practice - and the list of his patents is impressive to this day.

When Moog and ARP Instruments were rival companies, ARP being the second most known synthesizer brand, even Bob Moog recognised the technical merits of ARP 2500. First of all, unlike Moog synths of the day, the ARP had famously stable oscillators - so it didn't need the notorious frequent re-tunings due to oscillators drifting over time.

Unlike the modular Moog, this ARP legend has employed a matrix system and special pins to achieve the patching, instead of a mass of cables.

Illustrious names used the ARP 2500 and its more affordable successor, the ARP 2600: Pete Townshend, Jean-Michel Jarre, Jimmy Page, David Bowie, Herbie Hancock, Jerry Golsdsmith, Jeff Wayne... and many uses of the legendary synths are as famous as some of these artists.

In Star Wars, the R2-D2 robot's whistles and bleeps were made via ARP 2600, and a few years earlier, the musical communication with the UFO that landed in Close Encounters of the Third Kind was made on an ARP 2500...

Jean-Michel Jarre to this day possesses and uses an ARP 2500, and he employed it on the recent live revival of his classic Oxygene album, too.

As a masterstroke, ARP has also released a charming and eminently portable synth, too - the ARP Odyssey. It was a duophonic, compact and quite affordable powerhouse of a synth has become another sought-after legendary instrument, featured on countless records. Everybody from Klaus Schulze to Chick Corea to ABBA to Billy Currie has used this synths that was ultimately made in three versions.

What can illustrate better the longevity of A. R. Pearlman's ideas and innovations than the fact that mighty Korg in 2015 has resurrected the ARP Odyssey as something that some abbreviate fondly as the KARP Odyssey...

To quote Richard Boulanger, "even at 90 and beyond, Alan R Pearlman was still dreaming of new circuits, modules, and controllers! Undeniably, Alan R Pearlman was an engineering genius. Everyone recognizes that his synthesizers were beyond brilliant. But I truly believe that the heart and soul in his machines drew their spirit and life from Alan’s musical virtuosity on the piano, his truly deep musical knowledge, his passion and enthusiasm for “all” music, and his nurturing and generous support for young composers and performers, regardless of whether they were into classical, avantgarde, film, fusion, rock or pop."

Korg ARP Odyssey

It is extremely rare to have a brilliant engineer and innovator with deep musical sensitivity and understanding of what a musician needs. On top of that, Alan R. Pearlman had superlative feel for ergonomic design, for aesthetic considerations - therefore his creations were true gems of electronic instruments, in the fullest sense of that word.

It is not overstating his and his creations' significance if one says that his instruments had life-changing impact on many, on both technical minds and on great musicians who embraced technology.

Rest in peace, relentless innovator and dreamer...

The passing of a visionary

Ikutaro Kakehashi has passed away at the age of 87.

One wonders what other opening sentences can be written... Yes, he was the founder of the absolute legend that is Roland Corporation, the inventor and maker of an astonishing number of instruments that not only shaped, but also created, entire musical genres. 

If one says TR-808 or TR-909, then one means the birth of hip-hop and Detroit techno. If one says Juno or JP-8000, well, not sure where to even begin to enumerate the impact of these keyboards. If one says Jupiter-8, then one is basically lost for words. 

But then... he was also one of the two godfathers of MIDI, the standard for the way in which musical instruments and computers can digitally talk to each other. 

So much quasi-sensationalist and utterly tendentious (plus ill-informed) press has asked the question: is MIDI out of date, is MIDI limited...

MIDI was and still is an absolutely breathtaking future-proofed invention of a standard interface that outlasted countless others, and it is still going strong.

There was the invention of sound recording, which we take for granted now without realizing what it meant to be able to take music from the performer into the homes and hands of countless people who maybe never ever had the chance to see or hear that performer....

Then there was the birth of MIDI... 

How many of us can truly realize nowadays what it meant to be able, for the first time, to record an improvisation - not in sounds, but in actual  musical score terms of what was played, and then be able to change and layer on top of it, building up vast arrangements? 

How many nowadays truly realize what MIDI allowed suddenly, in unprecedented ways, in terms of capturing the details of a performance and then giving the musician the ability to edit all the musical information it captured, all the keyboard and controller events during playing?

Also, in terms of an interface, it is the genius of future-proofing. Since the decades of its inception, and the decades since it was turned into practical reality by the likes of Ikutaro Kakehashi, MIDI has managed to allow vastly different instrument of vastly different core technology to talk to each other seamlessly. 

The evolution of electronic instruments, studio gear and music software has been mind-boggling since MIDI was born, and it still allows all these immensely different gadgets to talk to each other in a standardized way.

A technical Grammy award given to him and Dave Smith is just the tip of the iceberg of significance and recognition... 

Entire musical genres would not have been possible without Kakehashi-san and his immeasurable contribution to musical instruments. 

Active to his very last years,he never stopped thinking about music, musical instruments, and musicians... "I Believe in Music" one of his book titles says... very, very few people can say that apparent cliche to be actually true and not only an expression, but also a living proof of one's life's body of work...

Rest in peace, Kakehashi-san...