Closer To The Sounds Of The Universe

May 28, 2021 6:02 PM

You might know him from the iconic Blade Runner soundtrack, (or the 1492 soundtrack, the Pear Films biography, the more recent soundtrack for the Rosetta Mission or indeed this previous post to the Blue) but today I would like to drop you into the middle of a two hour documentary called "Vangelis and the Journey to Ithaka", in which the man himself casually improvises an entire symphonic work on the most astounding rig I've ever seen.
posted by mhoye (28 comments total)

That's an amazing quantity of foot pedals!
posted by meehawl at 6:25 PM on May 28, 2021

Thank you for this. Vangelis is amazing.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 6:49 PM on May 28, 2021

That performance of his was really impressive. It reminded me of some of the great organ prodigies, using multiple manuals and foot pedals, rather than controlling a dizzying array of pipes, but a dizzying array of samplers. Seeing that performance was huge fun.
posted by tclark at 6:57 PM on May 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

So I'm a eurorack twiddler and an antique synth enthusiast. We live in a golden age of reissues and copies. So like I recognize that a lot of Vangelis' older sound is the Yamaha CS-80, an absolutely intriguing instrument of it's time. Someone told me it had presets and given the tech at the time, I was like, "how" so he sends me a video of how you can pop open a panel and under it is 8 sets of faders that are small copies of the main faders on top of the synth, so essentiallys, the "presets" are just someone pushing those to the positions they like and then not touching them.

Anyway, I posted that just to say, I don't recognize, like, a single piece of equipment on his desk there. And I'm struggling to even catch a brand or label or anything. What the hell are all those boxes with labelled buttons that he's selecting sounds from? What are the giant boxes on his right?
posted by RustyBrooks at 6:58 PM on May 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

Whatever that crazy getup is, it might be on this list somewhere (though I can’t find it).
posted by q*ben at 7:09 PM on May 28, 2021

Vangelis gear on Equipboard. (it asked for a sign-in, but I closed that and could read the list. I don't know when this was compiled, but it's lengthy and might answer questions.)

I'm a decades-long Vangelis fan. Elsewhere is a great resource for what he's up to lately and apparently he was interviewed for Earth Day this year by the arts department of the ESA.
posted by hippybear at 7:15 PM on May 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

because I just recently pulled the album out for the first time in a long time, Pulstar is worth a listen if you wish to get a tangible sense of what the future sounded like back in the mid-1970s.

Carl Sagan used it for Cosmos and even if you missed it there, it likely crossed your path some other way over the years.
posted by philip-random at 7:16 PM on May 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Me neither. I skipped quickly through the synth section, I know what most of that stuff is. But I peeked at everything else and nothing looks like them.
posted by RustyBrooks at 7:17 PM on May 28, 2021

and then this showed up on my Youtube sidebar. A Vangelis wormhole it is for me this weekend.

Vangelis Documentary - The unknown man
posted by philip-random at 7:19 PM on May 28, 2021

Both of those links are great btw, but I don't see *anything* like what he's shown operating at the timestamp in the docu link above or elsewhere in the video. He even seems to take that stuff live.
posted by RustyBrooks at 7:19 PM on May 28, 2021

I, too, would like to know more about that setup - what are those runes!? - but I would not be surprised to learn that there isn't "anything like" what he's operating there. I suspect that what we're looking at here is entirely custom hardware tailor-made for one specific person at the far end of half a century of brilliantly successful idiosyncratic synesthesia.
posted by mhoye at 7:35 PM on May 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

METAFILTER: entirely custom hardware tailor-made for one specific person at the far end of half a century of brilliantly successful idiosyncratic synesthesia.
posted by philip-random at 7:46 PM on May 28, 2021 [10 favorites]

A frustrating set of dead links that probably explained it in full; but at least I found out that he collaborated with GZA.
posted by q*ben at 7:52 PM on May 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

He even seems to take that stuff live.

Vangelis has long had a "play all the instruments doing it all at once" philosophy about his musical gear. A lot of his albums are improvs with overdubs, including a lot of his work with Jon Anderson.
posted by hippybear at 7:52 PM on May 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

I was able to find a little more info:

https://modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=94735
posted by jonathanhughes at 7:56 PM on May 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

Apparently it’s all made custom by Alyseum. The hieroglyphs are symbology for timbre.

On preview - beat me to the punch!
posted by q*ben at 7:56 PM on May 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

I am both saddened and a little relieved to find out it's custom stuff. Because I'm pretty used to at least having an *idea* whatever everything is by looking at it.
posted by RustyBrooks at 8:03 PM on May 28, 2021

Closer To The Sounds Of The Universe

Yet another MeFi thread title about an older musician that made my heart skip a beat.
posted by fairmettle at 8:33 PM on May 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

Music from the Hearts of Space.
posted by clavdivs at 9:18 PM on May 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

> A frustrating set of dead links

This one is on archive.org.
posted by DarkForest at 4:03 AM on May 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thank you! This tear down, combined with the video, makes me appreciate the degree to which Vangelis is as much a performer as a composer. This makes sense - one of the more impressive parts of the CS-80 was the keyboard itself, with great weighting and polyphonic aftertouch. Brian Eno is often quoted as saying that electronic techniques replace skill with judgement, and while that may be true for some artists like Vangelis show an alternative use of electronic music, creating new instruments that give the user nuanced and delicate control over sound in live performance. Most of the components in that video don’t even make sounds, they are instead a complex, bespoke control system to get this man closer to his machine.
posted by q*ben at 6:23 AM on May 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

That's why we produced the symphony orchestra because it's like the first synthesizer. (23:30)
posted by fairmettle at 6:39 AM on May 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Vangelis, ruling the audio Universe! His original psych rock band Aphrodite's Child was good too.
posted by Liquidwolf at 10:03 AM on May 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

The iconic Blade Runner soundtrack was also distinctive for being commercially unavailable for many years (?!), giving rise to many different bootleg editions, as well as the infamous New American Orchestra cover version.
posted by ovvl at 10:14 AM on May 29, 2021

I hope everyone in this thread has already seen Lords of Synth but if not...
posted by domdib at 10:32 AM on May 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

Oh, but the orchestral recording of the Blade Runner soundtrack was the original official score version released in 1982. Vangelis' version wasn't released until over a decade later.

It's the Esper Edition that you want, if you're digging around for the full score. Archive.org has it to download.
posted by hippybear at 10:46 AM on May 29, 2021

I haven't dug into Vangelis' catalog much, just because there's so much of it, but holy hot damn this is my speed.

Anyone tracking this thread would enjoy at least some of the entries in the Valley of the Sun Publishing catalog. This blog was archiving their tapes, and I think most of the catalog has been rereleased as compilations by Numero. It's good shit.
posted by furnace.heart at 11:23 AM on May 29, 2021

I love that he's completely at ease with insanely complicated electronics that a bunch of tech-savvy people here are struggling to understand ...

... and then uses paper and pencil to keep track of it.

This is a guy who was young when synthesizers became a thing, and middle-aged when computers did.
posted by Brachinus at 7:49 AM on May 30, 2021 [1 favorite]