One can travel from the…

…dark processions of the Inquisition to the peak of Mount Everest. And one can travel from delicate Chinese ornaments to vast Gothic vaults. One can travel from African tribes’ ceremonial polyrhythms to the hustle and bustle of a modern metropolis’s nerve centre. Also, one can travel from intimate folk ballads to the unleashing of colossal powers by ancient and future deities and demigods.

Above list is not exhaustive. You can find all this in the discography of one man who looked at synthesizers as creative tools serving any musical imaginings instead of specific instruments for a specific genre limited to specific sound worlds.

Looking back at many decades of musical output, perhaps the central characteristic that made all this seemingly impossible musical range a reality, was and is the refusal to treat technology as a dominant factor in the creative process.

First and foremost, there is, as some said, a great Romantic in front of those keyboards. Also, there is an eminently human passion that puts technology in the service of the imagined sound worlds that refuse to listen to artificially imposed boundaries of styles and genres. Vangelis doesn’t take a rather academic and cerebral approach to electronic creations and the studio workflow. Instead, Vangelis prefers to rely on improvisations and instinctive processes, as some of the rare studio footage from several decades shows.

It is an interesting…

…quasi-paradox in the case of Vangelis: treating complex, and often trailblazing, technology as just any other conventional instrument. An instrument that allowed him to produce the most unconventional results that move freely across the musical traditions of many centuries and many thousands of miles.

Vangelis in electronic music demonstrated what the late Ray Bradbury demonstrated in literature. He used the characteristic tools of the most futuristic outer realms of a chosen art form. One can create eminently evocative, passionate and hence emotional works that are not hampered, but instead are augmented, by the possibilities of the chosen creative tools. As he put it in an interview about electronic music:

The source is electronic, but what you do with it is the same as with acoustic instruments. Sound is sound and vibration is vibration, whether from an electronic source or an acoustic instrument. The way we use these sources is the key in order to define the musical result we require. Without neglecting the acoustic conventional instrumental works that are not hampered, but instead are augmented, I spend a fair amount of time dealing with the electronic sources of sound.

Someone asked a few weeks ago on a synth music forum: “What genre does Vangelis’ music belong to?” As all music journalists and reviewers struggled over the decades, so did the numerous forum members. Except for one who answered: as: “The genre is called Vangelis“.