Iannis Xenakis - Electroacoustic Works (KarlRecords)
(Review from The Wire Magazine, 2022. Much more to say anon about Xenakis, the non-musician and music education)
As elemental to me as Shakespeare, Aeschylus, the Bomb Squad. Public Enemy bought me to noise and consequently much of the music that - often with infantile contrarianism - subsequently gave itself that ‘noise’ name has been disappointing to me, displaying only a flabby indulgence a million miles away from the marshalled purposeful genuinely revolutionary possibilities in noise that hip hop tutored me in. When I first heard Xenakis that all changed. Here, it was clear, was someone without ego purely interested in the extreme possibilities of music, possibilities he doesn’t merely hint at but fully explores. Xenakis is never about portrayal or depiction. His music at its best fundamentally trusts you as a human being to be left stranded and immersed in the worlds - both quantum and universal - that he evokes. He doesn’t let you merely see the stars. He puts you next to them, he plunges you into the frenzied trajectories, inhuman pressures and unthinkable speeds of the universe. His music - ancient, futuristic - though created using 20th century technology, would be immediately understandable to any human being at any time, albeit in a prehistoric or pre-electronic world that human would hear pure witchcraft and demonology. Only Miles Davis would create alternate aural mirror-universes as engulfing and total as Xenakis. The five discs here could and should be wondered at, and wandered within, forever.
Much is made in the engrossing booklet that accompanies this remastered reissue, of the mathematical, scientific and architectural background which informs Xenakis’ work but I think what needs stressing is that his music is never an intellectual exercise, or one in which full understanding of Xenakis’ theories and ideas is needed. This music hits you, immediately and instantly with the force of a solar wind. On CD 1, the movement from the cosmic vortices of ‘Diamorphoses’ to the geologic chemistry of ‘Concret PH’ is stunning - and its Xenakis unerring ability to constantly destabilise your sense of perspective and place as a listener that makes this music so revelatory still. Burrowing all the way down from the interstellar to the molecular, the planetary to the granular, and just as able to suddenly zoom out to parallel multiverses, Xenakis music often resembles the enactment of a ritual, particularly on the stunning hemisphere-inversion that is ‘Orient-Occident’. This is sound that doesn’t let you simply observe but that demands an active physical and emotional response to its still-shocking otherness, sound so powerful it renders both his contemporaries in experimental composition and the innumerable noiseniks since nigh-on entirely superfluous. Sometimes you can even sense - seen with a Leone-like distance - human life; coins being flipped in the hand, bombing raids, radio decay, distorted electronic gurgles of sentient despair - but the Hadean inferno of sound he conjures on ‘Bohor’ remains a forebodingly natural galdr in which all four dimensions, especially time, become elastic, simultaneous, inescapable. The ‘Polytypes’ pieces on CDII and III refine and expand on these early explorations, incorporating ‘traditional’ instrumentation but always pulling and pushing those sounds of strings and horns to their limit, a rollercoaster of vertiginous and abyssal heights and depths that leave you utterly without bearings. Exactly HOW Xenakis created these works remains steadfastly inconceivable to anyone bar the players - but I strongly feel his music benefits not from analysis but surrender, from the deep trust he has in our imaginations and that we consequently develop for the free-flowing immensity and ferocious discipline of his vision.
Discs III & IV bring us Xenakis’ first longer-form works - firstly the miraculous Persepolis from 1972 (perhaps the clearest forward-pointer to massive later works like Kraanerg, Metastasis and Pithoprakta) a distinctly deranged reimaging of Greece’s ancient past and the turbid, tormented psychological and political wreckage of its civilizational collapse. What Xenakis does when he touches upon history is he almost depopulates it from human consciousness - rather what you hear is a tapping of something subterranean, the buried dreams and collapsed constellations of the solar-system as it swirls around tiny details of ground-level chaos. 1978’s ‘La Légende d’Eer’ is as conventionally narrative as this music gets, a sense of movement from the earth’s iron core to its buzzing, life-riven surface but even here Xenakis resists redemption or the relaying of concrete imagery. You simply have to be, exist, in this sound, and you can reach out and touch and feel every single aspect of that sound world, if you dare. The closing disc comprises some of Xenakis’ last compositions created in the late 80s and early 90s and show that far from standing still he was already tapping into the possibilities of digital sound manipulation to give his music yet more confrontational bite and bizarrely familiar terror. Tracks like ‘Taurhiphonie’ show that Xenakis was always at root not a musician but an amazing LISTENER, his addiction to bass frequencies, his commitment to ensuring that his music hits you with dorsal power and not just brain-jangling smarts surely emanating from someone less interested in the academy or posterity than he is interested in us, us human beings, and exactly how miraculous and inadequate our consciousness is in apprehending the full dizzying reality and unreality of existence. In arming us for our lives under the stars Xenakis is without peer. In my sonic bible he - or rather the music he made - is both Genesis & Revelation. It continues, and will, deathlessly, for all time, always offer both. Welcome to the universe.
Neil Kulkarni