Iannis Xenakis
GRM Works 1957-1962
AUSTRIA RECOLLECTION GRM REGRM 007 LP (2013)
Another essential reissue from Editions Mego’s Recollection GRM fold is this handsome vinyl collection of four of Xenakis’ key tape compositions pieces, previously available on CD (1997) with two additional tracks (omitted here for reasons of space and provenance [1. While I miss ‘Hibiki-Hana-Ma’ I finds its absence a fair trade-off for the incongruous, generative piece ‘S.709’ that ended the previous CD edition.]) and originally united on his Nonesuch album, Electro-Acoustic Music. This edition is garlanded in a new, debossed Stephen O’Malley-designed sleeve, though it preserves the insightful liner notes, which I’ll not venture to paraphrase more than necessary. Indeed, it seems utterly superfluous to attempt to restate the obvious fact of the importance and alien beauty of Xenakis’ work: as much so as it is to associate with it so much (lesser) modern electronic music that would see in it a progenitor.
The originality and grandeur of these pieces depict a prodigious composer hitting his stride early in his second career, with 1958 standing out as especially significant for him, being the year in which he co-founded the GRM, blueprinted the magnificent, alien-spired Philips Pavilion for the Brussels World Fair and still found time to assemble the hyper-meticulous ‘electronic poem’ ‘Concret PH’ from split second snippets of crackling embers. Along with Edgard Varèse’s sublime Poème Électronique the ‘sound sparkles’ of this successful experiment in variegated sound density were diffused through four hundred speakers to ‘achieve a joint emanation of architecture and music’. The composer’s facility for spatial dynamics is pronounced even in the confines of my meagre listening environment, so in the temporary interior of a futuristic construction these dense, glassy crackles must have been like an interplanetary radio broadcast, unless the patrons took the dim view of a university friend of mine who just laughed at my gullibility when I played this to him.
A more expansive experience, ‘Orient-Occident’ (1960) began as a UNESCO commission for a film by Enrico Rulchignoni, which would go some way to explaining the vivid, cinematic passaging between sonic events here, ranging from a reversed rainfall of coins to a brief hailstorm of clangs on various bell-like surfaces, as though the composer were in pursuit of some mythical metal archetype. This diversity – highlighted by the disparity of junctures – seems to echo the theme of the film: a comparison of museum artefacts from different cultures, and their implicit links throughout history: its ‘highly diversified means of transition, meant to link a type of material to another’.
The earliest dated piece is ‘Diamorphoses’ (1957-8): ‘a study of white noise and its graduations through the process of densification’ sounding like lightning-ripped ruptures in time and space that spit out backwards shooting stars and aircraft at a drunken crawl. It’s probably the most recognisably ‘contemporary’ concrète piece of all, yet still utterly bewildering: not least in its conceptual elucidation, concerning ‘continuity and discontinuity within evolution’ and such. Perhaps then it’s to the benefit of lesser intellects such as mine that Xenakis remained reticent about the deafening continuum of clang of ‘Bohor’ (1962), a revised version of which from 1968 completes the collection: distant church bells pealing through the second side like a broken-glass cathedral yawning its shards across all points in space, and culminating in a long, corrosive blast of noise. Xenakis dedicated the piece to Pierre Schaeffer, who apparently failed to be thrilled at the opportunity to ‘hear bells chime while standing inside them’. In this superior sounding vinyl edition (thanks again to Rashad Becker) though, it stands to receive a richly deserved second or third chance with the rest of us.