Future Noir Revised & Updated Edition by Paul M. Sammon

Author:Paul M. Sammon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

VANGELIS

Evangelos O. Papathanassiou, better known to music and soundtrack aficionados by the name Vangelis (pronounced, incidentally, with a hard “g,” as in “get”), was born March 29, 1943, in Volos, Greece. He was raised in Athens. A self-taught musician unable to read music, Vangelis composed his first piece, for piano, at the age of four. The musician quickly became adept at all types of keyboards and, at eighteen, joined the Greek rock band Formynx, in which he played a Hammond organ. Formynx quickly became Greece’s first popular early-sixties rock group. But when a military dictatorship assumed power in his homeland in 1968, Vangelis moved to Paris.

Here he formed another band called Aphrodite’s Child, a group that featured singer Demis Roussos, a popular European performer. (There is an interesting footnote here: Aphrodite’s Child’s first major hit was titled “Rain and Tears.” If the order of those words is reversed, we’re suddenly confronted with something very close to a famous utterance by Roy Batty: “Tears in rain.”)

By now, Vangelis was gaining a reputation as a first-rate composer of electronic music, one whose mastery of the synthesizer went well beyond the primitive noodlings usually produced on that instrument during this period. This reputation served him in good stead when the Greek musician next began composing a number of scores for French TV and films in the 1970s. One such collaboration was with French “nature film” director Frederic Roussif, for whom Vangelis did the music for Apocalypse Des Animaux and Opera Sauvage. (Sauvage, in particular, remains one of Vangelis’ most haunting and durable achievements.)

In the mid-seventies, Vangelis left Aphrodite’s Child and moved to London. Here Vangelis both signed a recording contract with RCA and fulfilled a longtime ambition by building a self-contained twenty-four-track music studio (or “laboratory,” as he calls it), Nemo Studios. Located near London’s Marble Arch, Nemo was the location where Vangelis composed his music for Blade Runner; this same studio also witnessed the birth of some of the talented musician’s most popular solo albums, which included Heaven and Hell, China, and See You Later.

At roughly the same time, Vangelis was recording albums with Jon Anderson, lead singer of the popular supergroup Yes. The composer subsequently stunned the rock world when he was offered—and turned down—the opportunity to replace Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman, when Wakeman decided to leave that high-profile band.

Since then, Vangelis has contributed distinctive, highly melodic scores to well-received TV series like Cosmos and created over two dozen soundtracks for such film directors as Costa-Gavras (Missing), Roman Polanski (Bitter Moon), and Ridley Scott (Blade Runner and 1492: Conquest of Paradise).

However, despite the amount of biographical information currently available on this man, Vangelis is actually an extremely private and serious musician who shuns the public limelight—which immediately presented a problem regarding this book.

Although Vangelis was certainly aware of Future Noir (and seemed to support it), he is also notoriously interview-shy, preferring to express himself through his music. Therefore, beyond some comments passed on through longtime associate Andrew Hoy (a British musician/Polydor

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.