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 Vangelis Register

In expectation of the upcoming piano album Nocturne, some internet comments on the first single from that album prompted a bit of an inventory...

No paperwork is involved, and it is not a catalogue of Vangelis releases... Instead, as some commented on Youtube along the lines of why Vangelis is releasing a "new age"-like album, or why he "pretends" to be a "classical composer" etc., it attempts to capture the list of genres, sub-genres and styles Vangelis has composed in. Some may have only heard of him due to certain soundtracks, but the full picture of his musical output is as astounding as one could possibly imagine (or not, in our world of increasingly pigeon-holed electronic music).

The list, admittedly, contains some quite loose categorisations, too - apologies, but latter are inevitable... not only because Vangelis often manages to fuse vastly different styles and genres, but also because often he can put a very personal spin on a well-established category...

So a quick "inventory" of what one can hear in his discography, with examples given as album and/or track titles:

• Early Medieval polyphony / Gregorian chant and Byzantine sacred music influences (parts of Mask, Heaven and Hell Part II, 1492 Conquest of Paradise, Ignacio)
• Echoes of mid- to late Renaissance secular and sacred music, including specific embellishments and phrasing (Monastery of La Rabida, parts of Direct and Opera Sauvage, a capella parts of Mask and Heaven and Hell)
• Jazz and jazz-rock (parts of Albedo 0.39, See You Later, Direct, Opera Sauvage)
• Progressive rock (Earth, certain Jon & Vangelis tracks)
• Space rock (Albedo 0.39, Spiral, Rosetta)
• Echoes of Berlin School i.e. works building on sequenced background and patterns (parts of Spiral, Direct)
• Minimalism, within that perhaps closest to a patterned/repetitive Steve Reich-like approach (Soil Festivities)
• "New Age", with a highly personal take on it (large parts of Oceanic, parts of Voices)
• Ambient (Creation du Monde, parts of The City, parts of Albedo 0.39 and Friends of Mr. Cairo)
• Electro-acoustic experimental (Beaubourg, Invisible Connections)
• Psychedelic rock (Hypothesis)
• Oratorio (Mask, Mythodea)
• Piano etudes (The Long March, seemingly the upcoming album Nocturne)
• 1920s style "easy listening" with 1950s arrangements (One More Kiss Dear)
• Synth-pop (I'll Find My Way Home and some other Jon & Vangelis tracks)
• Pop ballads (from Aphrodite's Child era, e.g. Spring Summer Winter and Fall)
• Eurodisco (Multitrack Suggestion)
• Rock 'n' Roll (Back To School)
• Symphonic poems / suites (El Greco - the studio album, Chariots of Fire final suite)
• Penderecki / Orff-style choral-symphonic suites (Heaven and Hell)
• Folk re-arrangements / re-interpretations (traditional and original songs on Odes)
• Blues and blues-rooted ballads (parts of Blade Runner, some Jon & Vangelis collaborations, Le Singe Bleu)
• Vocal-instrumental experiments and improvisations (Curious Electric and other parts of Short Stories, parts of See You Later)
• As a genre in itself, cinematic soundtracks (albeit spanning several above categories) - obviously, no examples are needed here of some of his era-defining classics... 

Identifiable specific ethnic influences:

• Celtic (Irlande, from Opera Sauvage)
• African (La Fete Sauvage)
• Far-Eastern (obviously the entire album China, some tracks on The City)
• Near- and Middle Eastern (2 tracks on Blade Runner, parts of Alexander, the ballet score The Thread)
• Greek secular and Byzantine sacred music influences (Earth, El Greco OST & same title studio album, original tracks on Odes, Rapsodies)
• Spanish / Andalusian with clear Moorish influences (parts of 1492 Conquest of Paradise)
• Native American Indian (parts of 1492 Conquest of Paradise)

It is a simple, but rather astonishing, fact that he really is the one and only synthesizer artist who managed to create music with such range - regardless of one's taste, the list is simply astounding. Whether one can appreciate all these musical genres, styles, historic periods' and geographic areas' specific musical characteristics, that is another matter entirely.

Considering that all of the above are instantly recognisable as works by Vangelis, one is reminded of a social media thread not so long ago. It asked, what genre does he compose in - the only correct answer was that the genre is called... Vangelis.

Vangelis - Nocturne, the new 2019 piano album

The surprise announcement of a new Vangelis studio album to be released in 2019 came few days ago.

Release dates are different in some sources (CDS states 15 Feb 2019, Amazon states January 2019), and pre-orders are already taken by some retailers. It will be a CD and double vinyl release.

What is known so far? It will be a solo piano album (!) with some tracks re-arranged from Vangelis's earlier albums. 

The track list so far was posted on Amazon Germany only, whilst others say it will come with new information on 7 Dec. It will be hugely interesting to see piano arrangements for some of the tracks, and to see how the ever-enigmatic Maestro surprises us with new material:

1. Nocturnal Promenade

2. To the Unknown Man

3. Mythodea - Movement 9

4. Moonlight Reflections

5. Through the Night Mist

6. Early Years

7. Love Theme (From "Blade Runner")

8. Sweet Nostalgia

9. Intermezzo

10. To a Friend

11. La petite fille de la mer (From "L'Apocalypse des animaux")

12. Longing

13. Main Theme (From "Chariots of Fire")

14. Unfulfilled Desire

15. Lonesome

16. Conquest of Paradise (From "1492: Conquest of Paradise")

17. Pour Melia

Retro futures, futuristic retrospectives: Equinoxe Infinity by Jean-Michel Jarre

Four decades after the seminal album Equinoxe, one of the most significant artists of the French School of electronic music has released a concept album that is tightly connected with that memorable epic from the late '70s.

It is concerned with the advent of artificial intelligence and the increasing digitisation of our lives. As Jean-Michel Jarre put it in a recent interview, after a somewhat disappointing contrast between what we idealistically expected from the new millennium and what we actually had in terms of technology, we are returning to that sense of wonder about the future.

Whilst the album intends to imagine what the world may look like in 40 years' time, both with its utopian and rather more dystopian elements, it embraces eminently retro technology, too - together with state-of-the-art production. Jarre has used some of his earliest analogue synths in his arsenal, hence sonic references to his first two albums are abundant - but we have also the latest digital technology eminently present in the journey that Equinoxe Infinity is.

As with the second and third installment of what has become the Oxygene trilogy, it was quite a task to make the album sound contemporary, make it stand on its own, yet directly reference the instantly recognisable sonic world that made the originals into major landmarks of the history of electronic music.

The opening track, The Watchers, has those direct references in the arrangements, yet the main musical motif is surprisingly Vangelis-esque in its gentle melancholy and the inflections - one is reminded of Oceanic.

Flying Totems injects considerable energy and synth-pop DNA into the mixture of different moods that the album gradually proves to be. The layers of sequenced motifs and electronic effects are self-consciously pointing us toward the Jarre sound of the late 1970s, with catchy and soaring melodic lead lines - an instant lift after the meditative opening of the album.

Robots Don't Cry is continuing the very direct references to the percussion, sequencer and melodic patterns of Oxygene and Equinoxe of yesteryear, including that characteristic glissando - whilst some bass arrangements are quite here-and-now...

All That You Leave Behind maintains that tight connection with the 1970s soundworld in Jarre's discography, whilst the melody and the overall mood of the track is of almost anthemic nature.

If The Wind Could Speak and Infinity show the age-old truth: simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve. Both tracks are charming in the purity and simplicity of the melodic lines, the latter is quite  typical chart material - with the chorus and its arrangements making again very direct references to the opening track of the 1978 album's B side. So is the way in which blends into Machines Are Learning, the 7th movement, with the sequencer pattern reminding us, probably quite intentionally, of the former album.

Both aforementioned movements 5 and 6 tracks also introduce processed and pitch-shifted vocal sounds. In 2018, one could forgive listeners for thinking just how retro this all sounds... If one recalls the mind-blowing innovative world of Zoolook from the early 1980s (at a time where most used the revolutionary Fairlight sampler for just pedestrian playback of samples), this use of vocal samples in 2018 strikes one as quite conservative, even trivial.

The Opening continues with tight bass sequences reminiscent of the 1978 album, showing again a conscious choice of synth sounds to reference the B-side of that LP. It is another driving and high-octane, unashamedly happy and entertaining track.

Don't Look Back is more pensive, the filter sweeps on the white noise and the strings being again firmly rooted in the Jarre sound of the 1970s.

It almost seamlessly blends into the final track, Equinoxe Infinity, which is also a return to both the introspective mood of the opening track and its melody - making us think that perhaps the album will float away with this reprise... However, Jarre treats us to an epic build-up of patterns that start off deceptively simple - and lead to a majestic finale, which is all the more effective as it pulls back and calms to an almost ambiental, gentle soundscape in the last seconds of the album.

Overall, it is a structurally very cohesive and flowing concept album, albeit with quite a few gear shifts - it feels more consistent that the recent, and final, installment of the Oxygene trilogy.

There are no sharp changes and sudden corners in Equinoxe Infinity - it has, as the best of Jarre albums do, the ability to fill the room and transport the listener to a highly characteristic sonic Universe.

There are no excesses and there is no self-indulgent technological showing-off, the album is remarkably modest in a good sense...

One central contradictions remains: with all the musings about the future and how this album set out to meditate about how the world will look like in 40 years' time... can we find a single second on this entire album that is electronic music pointing to the future, instead of very self-consciously referencing the past?...

Whether it represents something still novel and unique in the soundscape of the second decade of the 21st century, whether it adds something memorable to the considerable Jean-Michel Jarre story of many decades of electronic music, well, that is a very personal verdict - one for each listener to make...

Fifty switched-on years: Wendy Carlos, a modular Moog... and Bach

The 1968 original cover

In October 1968, the seminal album Switched-On Bach was released. Wendy Carlos, using an era-defining Moog synthesizer, has surprised audiences with pioneering electronic renditions of selected Bach compositions.

In 2018, this may sound absolutely banale - even if in 1968 none other than the legendary pianist Glenn Gould held the ground-breaking performances in the highest regard. We are  nowadays taking electronic instruments for granted, and synthesizer reworkings of classical pieces have been ubiquitous...

One really needs to put Wendy Carlos's unprecedented achievement in technical, musical, and also cultural context.

Electronic instruments, even with the arrival of Robert Moog's classic synthesizer, have been laboratory curiosities until then. Even if some electronic works so-to-speak escaped into the popular realm well before 1968, synthesized sound has not truly exploded into popular consciousness until then.

The technical challenges were numerous, and one can get an insight into this by consulting countless notes and interviews done with Carlos and others. The list is quasi-endless, from notoriously unstable tuning to the often overlooked fact that the synth on which Carlos performed the Bach pieces was essentially monophonic - i.e. it could produce sound for one note at a time. Custom "chord generators" had to be made, with chained-together oscillators, such that Bach's chord structures could also take shape.

We must not forget, this was Bach actually played on the Moog - no automation or programming of any sort has taken place. A revolutionary touch-sensitive keyboard allowed very articulated performances. Still, it necessitated an almost superhuman way of playing when faced with a monophonic keyboard - something that Carlos modestly called "detached" playing, as each key had to be activated on its own. Try and keep an eminently fluid and spirited performance going, playing on such an instrument...

These technical difficulties, heroically overcome by Carlos, lead us to the musical achievement.

This may well be a switched-on and fully electronic Bach, but it is very switched-on from musical performance perspective, too. As much as some voices denigrated the results, even "serious" musicians, like the aforementioned Glenn Gould, and the unexpectedly numerous public embraced it.

Even now, half a century later, Carlos's performances (including the particularly superb choices made in terms of the arrangements, i.e. synthesized timbres) range from eminently subtle to joyously bouncy.

The cultural impact and its effect on the public's perception of the new electronic instruments have been immense.

The first cohesive and large work, with truly world-wide popular success, recorded entirely with synthesizers was not a stereotypical pop or rock tune (like Telstar in 1962). It was an entire album of popular works by J. S. Bach... as a result of a stunningly audacious adventure centred around a synthesizer monster that was just about emerging from its laboratory environment...

Wendy Carlos in 1968

Have all negative preconceptions, by now simply anachronistic prejudices, related to electronic instruments been put to rest during the fifty years that followed?

Yes and no.

Both utterly high-brow and utterly popular music widely employs synthesizers, and so does pretty much everything in-between... Very often, the artificial delimitation line between non-electronic and electronic instruments is entirely blurred or non-existent, as audiences may not even be able to tell the difference between some samplers and the instruments they sampled. Also, often complex processing of traditional instruments' sounds makes those sound eminently electronic when they are not...

However, some still see electronic instruments as tools for creating "sterile", "not human", "machine" etc. music. Some sub-genres of electronic music, which heavily rely on robotic rhythms or entirely intentional robotic aesthetics, certainly do not help in shifting these out-dated misperceptions.

Even within the Berlin School of electronic music, e.g. Kraftwerk represents a diametrically opposite aesthetic and artistic intent compared to e.g. Tangerine Dream. Former had a specific message centred on technology, whilst latter explicitly used technology as merely a creative tool and never let it take over. See Kraftwerk standing immobile with their laptops, and see Tangerine Dream still, 50+ years on, jamming in lengthy live improvised sets... The concept and the intent behind their respective art is vastly different - and the resulting music also shows the radically different, even opposite, approaches to synthesizers.

The great Romantic passion in works by Vangelis are quite different from the energies unleashed by any of the trance or techno acts, and comparisons are unfair to make - as there are no valid comparisons between eminently different musical intentions and aesthetics.

However, one could say that views that consider electronic music to be "sterile" have been conceptually wrong from the very beginning.

Even in 1968, people looking at (as some never listened or wanted to listen to) Wendy Carlos's monster Moog synth as a tool for "machine" music were committing a fundamental error.

Not because of subjective pros and cons and tastes... but because it is an (intentional or not) confusion of three different things: instrument, medium, and content.

Synthesizers, as obvious it may seem when rationally thinking about them, are merely instruments... One can make, and has made ,sterile or cerebral music with a flute, too...

As the late, unparalleled Isao Tomita said once, synth-made electronic sound is as natural as the sound of thunder made by nature's electric discharges... After all, what creates the sound doesn't matter - the boundaries and preconceptions are in our minds only...

From oxygen to outer space - Jean-Michel Jarre at 70

Photo: AFP

Jean-Michel Jarre, perhaps the most prominent post-avant-garde names of the French School of electronic music, turned 70 today.

Whilst he was already a prolific experimental and soundtrack composer before the 1976 release of his landmark album Oxygène, the latter has really projected his name onto the firmament of both popular and critically acclaimed electronic music.

Even in 2018, the album sounds futuristic, timeless and perfectly at home with state-of-the-art current space rock and ambient electronic albums - a fluid, bubbling and seamlessly flowing electronic symphony that still continues to hold many lessons for budding electronic musicians who choose to compose with intent a descriptive and emotionally involving sub-genre of electronica.

As they say, the rest is history...

Whilst Jarre has become perhaps even more known for the record-breaking gigantic concerts, where audiences were in their millions (absolute record was 3.5 million people) and the stage could often be an entire city even, his imaginative musical creations cannot be ignored.

His music was seen by some regimes as ideologically clean and "safe", the music of a technological future - hence it is not an accident, that he was the first Western musician officially invited to give live performances in post-Mao China.

While Jarre established himself as an unparalleled visionary when it came to live performances, with hugely innovative multimedia technology at work alongside his futuristic electronica, his use of innovative new musical instruments was also remarkable.

Cities in Concert - Live in Houston, TX

Fairlight, the pioneering sampler that completely changed music across countless genres, was mostly used even by luminaries like Herbie Hancock, Peter Gabriel, Art of Noise and Kate Bush as a digital instrument capable of playing back sound samples.

Then Jarre released the to this day astonishing album Zoolook, where he has taken the Fairlight to an unprecedented level, projecting us into a never before heard sonic Universe.

His use of sound processing and alteration via the new instrument sounds simply stunning even today - and all this was not done in a purely academic manner, making Zoolook actually enjoyable by the masses.

Whilst he ventured very happily into the realm of chirpy, dancey, highly trendy electronica, too, we cannot forget the fact that he also composed vast, almost cosmic requiem-sounding suites like Rendez-Vous, and ventured into "pure" electronic ambient music, too (the epic length title track on Waiting for Cousteau).

Even under the surface of sometimes very pop-sounding electronica, he often managed to hide complex musical ideas. A simple example would be Equinoxe, his second album, where the most popular track has employed time signatures that one is challenged to find in any chart-topping creation...

Even in 2018, even at 70, he is not only keeping up with the absolute latest greatest technological advances in sound synthesis, processing and music production, but he remains an influencer and a shaper of sound technology.

His latest studio double opus, the Electronica Vol. I and II., shows how he can collaborate with numerous electronic musicians who come from vastly different musical and technological backgrounds.

The tracks composed with the biggest names, ranging from Vince Clarke to Hans Zimmer to the late Edgar Froese (founder of the veritable Berlin School institution that is Tangerine Dream), show that Jarre's artistic range and sensitivity is able to integrate myriad musical ideas and sources into a coherent concept.

In ways that transcend particular subjective tastes and electronic music preferences, Jarre's trailblazing efforts in the field have left their mark on countless facets of music technology, including creative tools and approaches to the vast world of synthesizers.

His music is also testament to the fact that the most high-tech instruments are mere instruments, and the human using those instruments remains the key factor in the creative process... making the resulting music sometimes unashamedly romantic even, whilst created with (the still often misperceived as "cold") electronics.

Remembering Richard Burmer

When Vangelis in the 1970s' European musical landscape has started to release electronic music albums that were not sounding at all as many have expected electronic music to sound like, there was no other synthesizer artist who achieved that level of fusion between vastly different ancient musical traditions and electronics.

At that time, he was a composer of synthesizer music of a rather special kind, with emotive and evocative imaginings that were blending anything and everything from elements characteristic of African tribal music (La Fete Sauvage) to Celtic ballads (see Irlande on Opera Sauvage) to Far-Eastern music (see the LP China) to "pure" ambient sonic paintings well before Brian Eno was heralded as the creator of ambient music (see Creation Du Monde on Apocalypse Des Animaux).

While Vangelis was the most notable exception to what dominated the European electronic music scene of the time (Berlin School, French School, Synth Britannia, etc.), something happened on the other side of the Atlantic, too a decade later.

It demonstrated that even when it was not emerging from close-by ancient European and Eastern musical roots, electronic music of similar DNA could be born in the most unexpected ways. It did not emerge from the academic environments of major cities like New York, nor from some intellectual  West Coast movement's creative laboratory. Minimalism in the 1980's was a success already, often relying on electronics, too, Detroit techno was making strides, space ambient was very much active (Michael Stearns's seminal works, for example), Wendy Carlos long before rocked the world with classical reworkings... then something very different turned up...

Richard Burmer was born in 1955 in the town of Owosso, Michigan. He studied music composition in college - but established himself as a thoroughly imaginative sound designer for none other that the legendary E-mu Systems. The mere mentioning of the name Emulator is perhaps highly sufficient to summarize what era-defining instruments he created sound banks for.

However, in the 1980's he did not stop at the level of technical creativity - his first album Mosaic, beyond its electronic prowess, had tracks that already heralded what was about to come.

Delicate and atmospheric compositions like Under Shaded Water or the superbly sensitive electronic reworking of the Medieval music piece Lamento di Tristano already in 1984 told us that Richard Burmer is not embarking on an ordinary electronic music voyage.

His side-stepping of existing US-based electronic music of the time was actually achieved via superlative artistic sensitivity and a seemingly effortless blending of music from distant European centuries (Medieval and Renaissance era) and state-of-the-art electronics.

One could very much dare say that in the same way that Vangelis for a long time represented a unique voice in the electronic music landscape, Richard Burmer created a unique sound in the American synthesizer music vista.

His approach was and still remains rare: synthesizers were not seen as merely trailblazing sound generators, nor as instruments that would end up defining what music one was "supposed to" create with them... Hence we cannot find any forays into trendy electronica in Burmer's discography...

Richard Burmer viewed synthesizers as instruments that can connect and blend musical traditions from vastly different historical periods and geographical areas.

His album On The Third Extreme is a spellbinding work for those who like Eastern and Far-Eastern music flavors, Renaissance (specifically) and Early Music in general, all seamlessly combined in evocative and passionate soundscapes.

The track The Forgotten Season could be at home in any Early Music show that airs songs from the troubadours of the early Renaissance period.

Celebration In The Four Towers brings us moods and sonic visions that would find themselves at home in a grandiose scene of some Medieval-themed historic or fantasy movie.

Magellan brings us Eastern influences and driving ethnic percussions, fused with that emotive sound world that Burmer could produce with such immediate impact.

Turning To You is an example where ambiental, later labelled as "new age", soundscapes can be abstract, atmospheric and emotionally evocative at the same time.

We have a technically extremely competent engineer-composer-performer, who did not get lost in the enticing possibilities of the instruments, and did not end up putting the instrument in front of the artistic intent.

Instead, Richard Burmer had started from musical worlds that had central aesthetics that were diametrically opposite to the, then still novel and path-finding, electronic music - and leveraged the possibilities of the new instruments to make boundless and poignant musical journeys across unexpected expanses of space and time.

If his electronic music made us dance, it did that in the style of ancient music of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. If his music made us dream, it did that with nostalgic, often uniquely elegiac, evocations of idyllic landscapes - hence compilations like Shining By The River are very aptly titled.

Richard Burmer passed away in 2006, aged only 50 - a memorial page was established on his official website, and the 12th anniversary of his passing is on 9 September.

Hot summer months can make us think of the Electronica festivals springing up all over the Northern hemisphere - but they can remind us of his wonderful sonic journeys, too, which often evoke idyllic summer vistas.

Three years on... the Dream continues

Edgar Froese (Photo: commons / wikimedia)

Edgar Froese, the founder of the electronic legend, well, almost institution that was and is Tangerine Dream, passed away three years ago, on 20 Jan 2015.

As a prominent and eminent figure of what became known as the Berlin School, he has navigated through almost five decades of tumultuous musical, technological and social changes with his band.

As a figure of speech, we can probably say countless studio and live albums, a long list of illustrious soundtracks have been created, plus of course numerous solo albums.

A quintessential characteristic of his philosophy and that of the music of Tangerine Dream has been the fact that technology never took over and never became the ultimate goal. It always served a purpose as a mere creative tool, as revolutionary as it was in Edgar's and his band mates' hands.

Edgar would be very happy to see the band today and his legacy - and he may well be extremely happy at, as he put it, another cosmic address he moved on to in January 2015.

The 50th anniversary album, Quantum Gate, which was also reviewed here has been a great success.

The number of not just electronic but rock and other music magazines that have almost re-discovered Tangerine Dream was a joy to see.

The return to improvised live performances and the release of these lengthy pieces are a superb renaissance for the fans, who last heard such concert pieces several decades ago.

The current members of TD, Thorsten Quaeschning, Ulrich Schnauss and Hoshiko Yamane, have taken Edgar's overall musical and creative philosophy successfully into Edgar's posthumous period.

There is something remarkable happening, and Edgar would be, we can be sure, all too happy to witness this: unlike bands like Yes, who without a defining figure joining them live have really lost their way and leading to rather mechanical live album releases, Tangerine Dream is continuing with vast bursts of new creativity.

While the sound stayed instantly recognisable, it is a TD of the 21st century and with state-of-the-art, but musically functional as ever, technology.

On a personal note, I first came into contact with Edgar and TD's music as a teenager, beyond the Iron Curtain. I like to always point out for people who could access any music at any moment in any circumstances, that getting my hands on such music was a lengthy but rewarding adventure... and what escapism it was!

However, I would never have thought that more than three decades later I shall be treated to fresh and invigoratingly scintillating Tangerine Dream albums that have the unmistakable presence of Edgar's musical spirit still.

While remembering with sadness Edgar, there is joy in witnessing a quite unique phenomenon in the contemporary music scene.

Rest in peace, tremendous wizard of sounds, of time and space - and very glad to still have You with us in the continuing story of the phenomenon called Tangerine Dream!

Gary Numan's Savage - and a tale of music categorisation

Normally Gary Numan would need no introduction.

However, a recent clash between the rigid categories some operate with and the creativity that characterises the likes of Gary Numan perhaps warrants one - just to put in context a wider point to be made here...

It is a tale of how a label, which once described the most innovative and category-defying music, could be gradually so narrowed by some music industry machinery that it describes, at best, a single musical stereotype.

Normally we have had labels widen so much that they became all-inclusive. Thus they have lost all meaning due to the music industry's attempts of filling the new box with anything they could not fit into other rigid boxes.

Here, though, we have the remarkable opposite trend in its terminal stages.

As one of the most notable names in electronica, with a long list of names from Prince to Trent Reznor to Marilyn Manson quoting him as key influence, Gary Numan is to electronic music what Philip K. Dick is to the more philosophical section of science-fiction literature.

Although Numan is an artist who has had a key role in bringing electronic music into the mainstream pop culture, his dystopian visions, introspective lyrics coupled with his instantly recognisable sonic Universe elevated him way beyond electro-pop - ever since his Tubeway Army mega-hits up to his latest concept album.

Savage (Songs From A Broken World) is again a dystopian and mesmerisingly philosophical work, with musical elements that range from the familiar but characteristic Numan sonic palette to Middle-Eastern flavours.

A superb follow-up to Splinter, again with Ade Fenton in the producer's chair, we get thought-provoking meditations on our world and our existence, while the music takes us from electronic rock constructs to symphonic heights that linger in one's mind long after the record stopped playing.

However, being a distinctive voice nowadays can clash with the mechanical image certain music "specialists" have about the Universe.

Billboard, the well-known chart company, needs no introduction either.

Their definitions of album sales are nowadays desperate and gloriously inept attempts of moulding and bending eminently outdated music industry business models onto the new rapidly changing shapes of the digital world inhabited by its digital consumers.

As difficult as it may seem, Billboard recently managed to surpass themselves in their attempts to define this, to use a physics analogy, intricate quantum physics-governed world with rigid Newtonian models.

They have decided that Gary Numan's new album does not fit their dance/electronica category. As they expressed it, the album is basically "not electronic", instead it fits in the rock/alternative category.

The technical details happen to be such that around 95% of the album has been produced on and with electronic instruments, by one of the most recognisable electronic artists of the last four decades. As Gary Numan himself has rightly pointed out, it is the most electronic record since his album The Pleasure Principle (1979).

But the problem revealed by the Billboard absurdity is wider than any debate about one's list of one's studio gear.

The telling and worrying aspect is that key names in the music industry are grasping at labels that used to denote the most boundless, experimental or more mainstream, sonic world.

While they grasp at these labels, in an attempt to rigidly categorise the vastly varied palette used by electronic artists, they end up narrowing and narrowing the field of view.

Electronic, in their  rapidly shrinking understanding, basically can only mean dance - but even EDM, electronic dance music, is a ludicrously meaningless label nowadays as it has countless vastly different sub-genres and styles.

Unless an artist fits into this ultra-narrow box, even the likes of Billboard need to resort to a radical re-categorisation - Gary Numan and Depeche Mode are now "rock/alternative"... Listening to their recent two albums make this categorisation a superb absurd tragicomedy.

We have had categories like progressive rock widening, widening, until they lost all meaning as they just became a bucket for music industry luminaries to shove any out-of-the-box creation into.

The same happened to new age, starting out with a defined (albeit dubious) scope and intent, but ending up with artists like Tangerine Dream and Vangelis being categorised as such...

Remember alternative rock? The one where musicians ended up all looking and, rapidly, sounding the same and far from being alternative expressions of anything?

However, the recent Gary Numan episode is showing something very different.

Instead of desperately widening the meaning of a, hence increasingly rendered meaningless, category, they end up constricting a vast category to something that becomes an ultra-narrow one.

They can only fit inside it a tiny subset of just one stereotypical mainstream incarnation of what the musical genre really used to denote.

The wider and more imaginative that genre was once, the narrower its actual use as a label has become.

The darkest effect of this mental constriction, stemming from still not updated business models and patterns of thoughts that go with it, is that it started to feed back on itself.

The major names in the music industry, the likes of Billboard, have become eminently irrelevant in the greater scheme - but until their irrelevance is final, unfortunately they are still affecting musicians - and how they are judged by other elements of the rusting echo chambers that Billboard & Co operate in.

Artists producing imaginative electronica without dance loops and archetypal arrangements are placing themselves outside the one and only rigid, narrowed to a point of singularity, box tthat he mainstream music industry can think in.

One has to wonder what cataclysmic infliction changed the same music industry giants from celebrators and promoters of the most innovative and stylistically boundless music into dangerous automatons that can only imagine that music as something confined to their mental image of a dance floor...

Schulze at 70

Klaus Schulze, one of the true godfathers of electronic music, has just turned seventy.

Anybody permanently affected, in the best possible sense, by his truly unique style of synth music output spanning fifty years, can only wish a very Happy Birthday to the  maestro and many more to come...

From the heroic early days of Tangerine Dream collaboration in the late '60s to the similarly heroic, and still landmark value, solo albums like Irrlicht and Cyborg, Klaus Schulze's musical journey has given us many changes in musical direction and style, many philosophical changes...

However, his style has remained instantly recognisable - and very few dared to maintain his courage of creating ever-evolving tracks that most often occupy the full length of the physical medium. Compositions of 70 minutes length are far from unusual in the world of Klaus Schulze...

Like with any artist of astonishingly long career, some philosophical changes in direction have been questionable. Some may recall how the "death" of analogue synths was announced in a resounding album title, then later to see a superb return to that technology... or how a certain period was marked by an abundance of samplers that, even in the artist's own admission, took him away from a truly personal voice.

Apart from such escapades, the relentless innovation and experimenting has been a hallmark of his vast discography. He started as drummer and perhaps, as in the case of the other sequencer wizard, Chris Franke of Tangerine Dream, helped him to have a quite different approach to sequencers...

His precise command of intricate, multi-layered, mind-bendingly ever-evolving sequences has led to what became one of the key ingredients of his compositions that made the latter stand out compared to the rather traditional and mechanical use of sequencers.

Even when blending into his music Eastern vocals, operatic voice, cello improvisations, or Lisa Gerrard's truly unparalleled vocal improvisations, there has always been one key feature of his music that even other heralded "ambient" or "space" music artists did not manage to achieve.

No matter how vast the soundscapes are in length and complexity, not only there is something always changing every few seconds, making it a truly mind-blowing experience on a closer listen, going behind the sometimes hypnotically repetitive passages... but... and it is a huge "but":  Klaus Schulze has established a type of electronic music that seems to happen on its own...

When listening to his varied output, one does not get the feeling that this is electronic music that is created and performed by someone, with the exception of his fiery Moog improvisations...

It is music that seems to emanate on its own, and fold and change every few seconds, without humans and instruments actively creating it. Think of the landmark that was Timewind... still as mind-blowing now as it was in 1975.

Not that this dehumanises his music - not at all, for that we need to look at the eminently different Kraftwerkian school where technology takes over and this in itself is central and intentional in its aesthetic.

Klaus Schulze's perhaps greatest achievement is that he created for half a century an eminently human, passionate, deep "space" music that makes us disconnect from the practicalities and thoughts related to the mechanics of how this music is created.

It just exists and evolves, taking us on vast journeys that any amateur, professional or long-time established star of "ambient", "space" etc. genre should still learn from - after many decades of listening to these genres, one can argue there really is no other person out there who comes close to creating the worlds that Klaus Schulze created and still creates.

Therefore... even more emphatically, many many happy birthdays Maestro!