IGOR WAKHEVITCH 1ST LP FRENCH ELECTRONIC-PROG-PSYCH-NWW

$

83

IGOR WAKHEVITCH

 LOGOS LP

Pathe Marconi EMI 1969

Very rare debut from the 60's from french composer Igor Wakhevitch, a sound ritual for pop group.

Some info on the release:  "Rituel sonore pour Group Pop' (TRIANGLE), choeur mixte et bande magnétique" ("Sound ritual for Pop Group (TRIANGLE), mixed choir and magnetic tape"). Ballet of N. Schmucki. First performance at the Avignon Theater Festival of 1970. Released on Pathe Marconi EMI in a small quantity of copies, making this very hard to find through the years.

Here's a review from the web: "The first beautiful, intense and avant gardist effort from Igor Wakhevitch. "Logos" perfectly oscillates between modern classical music, organic electronic soundscapes and psychedelic rock. The album starts with a serie of interlocking cinematic, acoustic pieces that could be written as a score for theatre or contemporary dance performance. The amtospheres are nice, evocative and strangely abstract with haunted sustained drones, mysterious operatic female / male voices, manipulated tapes and a wide range of noises, drums, cymbals, violin echoes and electronic intermittences. "Danse Sacrale" is a tense & transcendant psychrock "trip" that culminates the album. Good guitar sections and monolithic, cavernous drums. This is the most progressive rock release of Wakhevitch with the alchemic "Docteur Faust". A so amazing listening!"

Igor Wakhevitch is a a french "musique concrete" / electro acoustic composer who has worked in many musical directions, always sensitive to new ways of expressing sonic sound constructions. In different contexts, he explored the acousmatic approach of processed sounds but also occasionaly dissipates this compositional form into psych rock aesthetic. Igor Wakhevitch's musical universe is a patchwork of styles. His musical background is heavily influenced by contemporary avant garde, dodecaphonism and sound experimentations. At the end of the 60's, he notably worked for the french "Group of musical research" (connected to the ORTF) under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer. His first electro-acoustic pieces have closed relationships with others french precursors as Luc Ferrari or Bernard Parmegiani. "Logos" (1970) and "Aethenor" (1971) reveal pretty excellent spectral forms & modulations which concentrates the listener in seriously dark, immersive mentalscapes. A few pieces contain rocking, spaced out instrumentations in the genre of cosmic krautrock classics (during this early period, Igor Wakhevitch was also a great friend of Robert Wyatt et Mick Ratledge).

Published in 1973, the sumptuous "Hathor" marks a turning in IW's personal career. It was recorded after he met Terry Riley (the father of spiritualized minimalism). "Hathor" is deeply impregnated by magical and tellurical elements. In 1974, the surrealist painter Salvador Dali employed IW to write the music of his audiovisual "opera poème" in 6 parts, the result is named "Etre Dieu". During the 80's Igor Wakhevitch decided to live in the south of India, he wrote musical scores for the Goethe Institute and the National Center of Performing Arts à Bombay (in 1991). IW's last publications are largely reserved to theatre, opera performances, epic electronic pieces for orchestrations and straight meditative synthezisers. All IW's career provides a subliminal collection of experimental electronic recordings.

Igor Wakhévitch, son of the art director Georges Wakhévitch, is an avant-garde French composer who released a series of studio albums in the 1970s and composed the music for the Salvador Dalí opera Être Dieu. He was a contemporary of similar avant-garde electronic composers, such as Pierre Henry. Although Wakhévitch is a relatively unknown composer, he gained a small cult following in the late 1990s after praise circulated by Nurse with Wound (on the list of influences in their first album, from 1979), Michael Gira of Swans and a review of one of his studio albums by Dominique Leone for a feature entitled "It Was the Strangest Record I Had Ever Heard" on Pitchfork Media.

Wakhévitch studying under Olivier Messiaen and won the first prize in Musical Analysis. In 1968, he worked for the GRM in the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer. Wakhévitch was a part of the 1960s atmosphere of musical integration and boundary crossing. He was friends with Maurice Béjart, who encouraged him to compose for contemporary dance companies, and studied with Pierre Schaeffer; while his second album, Doctor Faust, was dedicated to his friends Robert Wyatt and Mike Ratledge of rock group The Soft Machine. At the beginning of the 1970s, Wakhevitch became friends and studied with minimalist musician Terry Riley, through whom he discovered the ragas of Pandit Pran Nath. In 1974, Salvador Dalí asked him to compose music to accompany his 'opera-poem in six parts' entitled "To Be God". The album was recorded in the Studios of EMI in Boulogne, performed by various speakers and singers, an orchestra, and a rock band which featured the actors Raymond Gérôme, Delphine Seyrig, Catherine Allegret, Alain Cuny and Didier Haudepin and musicians Michel Ripoche on violin, Didier Batard on bass and Franois Auger on drums. Wakhevitch visited India in 1973, and moved to Auroville in South India in 1980. In 1991, he met the Dalai Lama in the Théâtre Renault-Barrault in Paris at a performance by the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts.

Condition: Vinyl lies in only good+ condition, looks to have a lot of marks and plays with crackle and some surface noise, mainly at the beggining of each side. Cover lies in very good+ condition, with slight corner wear and a small moisture damage at the bottom of the inside of the gatefold and at the back cover.

Tracklist

SHIPPING & PAYMENT

Shipping: Shipping for this  LP is 7$ airmail in Europe / 9$ for the rest of the world
Registered mail: +5$
Insurance: optional
Combined shipping: BIG discounts
Payment: Paypal 
Packaging: I am a collector too and i know