The short version
- Albedo 0.39 → Spiral → Heaven and Hell → Opéra sauvage → Blade Runner. Speed, instrument, composer, quiet, masterpiece.
- Turn it up. Berlin music is quiet. This is not.
- Do not open with Blade Runner. A record you already have opinions about will drown out the rest.
- He got to the same place without a sequencer. Of the five, he is the only one who took a different road.
Vangelis is the odd one out among the five artists this site is built on. Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Jarre and Kitaro all start from the same place: a machine playing a pattern, and a person deciding what to do with it. Vangelis started at the piano. He played everything by hand, in real time, usually in one take, on a Yamaha CS-80 he treated like a Steinway, and patience did not interest him. What he had instead was the biggest sound anyone ever got out of a synthesizer, and two pieces of music the whole planet knows. Those two come last. Here is why.
First, the basics. Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, born 29 March 1943 in Agria, near Volos. His parents put him in lessons at six, but formal teaching never took, so he worked out his own way of playing, and he never learned to read or write music. He played in Greek pop bands, then in Aphrodite's Child in Paris, and in 1975 he built a sixteen-track room called Nemo Studios in Marble Arch, London. He called it his laboratory. Everything in this guide was recorded there, by him, alone.
The CS-80 is the sound. It was polyphonic, so he could play chords, which Berlin mostly could not. It was touch-sensitive, so it swelled and sang under his hands. And it was huge. The method was improvisation: he played a piece once, to tape, and that was the record. It is the opposite of a sequencer, and it arrives at the same place. That is why he is here.
- Do not start with Chariots of Fire or Blade Runner. You have heard them, you have opinions, and those opinions will get in the way of everything else.
- Play each record straight through. The pieces are short, but the sides are shaped, and the running order carries the meaning.
- This is loud music. Turn it up and let the CS-80 fill the room. That is what it was built to do.
The five, in order
Albedo 0.39
The space record, and the right way in. Short pieces, big tunes, real drums, and a title track in which a voice reads out the physical facts of the Earth one by one: its mass, the length of its year in several units, and finally its albedo. "Pulstar" is the one everyone has heard on television, nearly six minutes of pure forward drive. The one that gets hold of you is "Alpha", a simple rising figure that repeats and swells. It is the closest he ever came to Berlin, and he got there by accident, from the other side. Both pieces went into Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and "Alpha" was cut to a sequence on evolution so that the music peaks just as humans appear. Start here because it is fast, faster than you will believe until you hear it.
Spiral
The CS-80 arrives, and you can hear him working out what it can do. This is the first of his albums it appears on. "To the Unknown Man" is a single melody growing for nine minutes, and the swell under his fingers does the job Berlin gave to filters. The credits list a sequencer too, one of the very few times he used one. It goes second because the sound of his next twenty years is invented here.
Heaven and Hell
The first Nemo record, and the most ambitious. Two side-long suites with a choir and two singers, and a synthesizer straining to become an orchestra. Uneven, and staggering. The passage Carl Sagan took for the Cosmos theme, the third movement of the first part, is the most beautiful four minutes on this site. Still, it comes third. It is a long, strange, half-classical record, and you should meet the melodist before you meet the composer.
Opéra sauvage
The quiet one, and the record closest to everything else on this site. Written for Rossif's nature series, it is slow and wide and mostly CS-80. And it holds "L'Enfant", which Peter Weir used in two scenes of The Year of Living Dangerously in 1982. "Hymne" was the sound of an Italian pasta commercial all through the eighties. It goes fourth because by now you can hear the difference between loud Vangelis and quiet Vangelis, and this is where quiet Vangelis lives.
Blade Runner
Now. You know this record, or you think you do. It comes fifth because only then do you really hear it. All four earlier records are inside it: the swell of Spiral, the choir of Heaven and Hell, the space of Opéra sauvage, the drive of Albedo. It also took twelve years to come out, and the reason is at the end of this page. It comes last because it is his best, and you should meet the man before you meet his best.
What you have just heard
A man who threw out every part of the Berlin method and arrived at the same place. No sequencer, no patience, no repetition. Instead, a pianist's hands on the most expressive synthesizer ever built, played once, played loud, and left alone. He belongs here because the destination is the same: music that sounds like a place, and that makes you feel small in the good way. He simply took another road, and there was more traffic on it.
Before Nemo
Aphrodite's Child in Paris, 666, and the first Rossif scores. A rock musician discovering the synthesizer.
Nemo, London
Everything in this guide. The RCA years, the CS-80, and the film scores that made him a household name.
Big scores and quiet records
Antarctica, Direct, 1492. Some of his best work, and some of his most expensive-sounding.
The late work
El Greco, Mythodea, Rosetta, Juno to Jupiter. Slow, sacred, orchestral. For the already converted.
Save these for later
- Albedo 0.39 → Spiral → Heaven and Hell → Opéra sauvage → Blade Runner. Speed, instrument, composer, quiet, masterpiece.
- Send a friend "Tears in Rain", and send this with it: that record did not come out for twelve years. After the film failed, the release was blocked, and what appeared in 1982 was an orchestral rearrangement credited to the New American Orchestra. For twelve years what people actually played were bootlegs. The real thing arrived in June 1994.
- Then play "Alpha" and "Phaedra" back to back. One is a machine pretending to be a person, and the other is a person pretending to be a machine.
That is all five.