LOGOS

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!

Logos is the debut album from this bizarre, wonderful man Igor Wakhevitch. This album made up of stark, enigmatic and ritualistic percussion and choral chanting all put together on an avant-garde electrical base. The electronics don't usually stand out as obviously as they do on Wakhevitch's later albums; they're used here mostly to set a smooth and dark atmosphere, and to add accentuating experimental noises to the bleek choral and string arrangements. There is a wonderful marriage of 20th century classical and avant-garde experimentalism that would sound like one of A. Berg's slower vocal works performed under K. Stockhausen's direction, and doesn't sound much different from the material found on Hathor. There is occasional electric guitar on this album, but it doesn't stick out until the last couple of tracks, which almost serves as a foreshadowing to Docteur Faust.

Another piece of highly recommended avant-garde electronic album from Wakhevitch.

An Olivier Messiaen pupil, Igor is one of the more esoteric artistes of the French 70's, with his legendary six avant-garde (almost musique concrète) albums, of which Logos is the first. This first project was actually the music for a modern ballet of Schmuki to be performd at the Avignon Festival of that same year. Oddly enough, despite the highly experimental nature of his music, all six albums of his were released on major labels, but I doubt that they hardly exposed to the mainstream public. His debut was released on the Pathé major label (for France, anyway) and featured an "atomic or molecular artwork, on top of also gusting the entire Triangle pop-rock group (also on the Pathé label) as a back up band.

Opening on a very 2001 Space Odyssey piece with eerie choirs and electronic music that could be labelled as "concrete", Ergon gives a good idea of Igor's fascination and fixation. The following piece describing the three reigns (Mineral-Vegetal and Animal) is no less abstract a description, when one could've imagined more organic soundscapes. Only sporadic drumming holds you back from sliding into insanity. If you can imagine Floyd's studio disc of Umma Gumma soundscapes on acid, you're getting close to Igor's fantasies. The HS Ignorabimus is closer to a space rock with a classical violin. The following Initiation (cut in two parts for time constraint reasons on the vinyl) is no more accessible, resembling to some bizarre sect initiation done by a drugged out shaman. The album-longest Danse Sacrale is definitely where you hear that Igor was thinking "rock" as well, because you finally get the full Triangl group for a few minutes, with Jeanneau's piano, Lorenzini's guitar and Fournier's bass on top of Prévotat's drums. They sound a bit like a cross of Magma and the future Art Zoyd band. The short closing Omega piece is an extremely doomy rock piece as well.

Please note that if you're familiar with Triangle's pop-rock discography, you'd have a hard time recognizing the same band. One can only dream about what the band would've achieved had they been more artistically ambitious rather than commercially ambitious. Anyway, Igor's Logos is a highly-lauded experimental affair, but it is mostly bound to remain in the shadow of obscurity. I guess the present album would b vn more interesting when viewing the ballet it came with, but it doesn't hurt the music if it stands alone.

Logos by Igor Wakhevitch reminds me of Tangerine Dream's Electronic Meditation - a dissonant spooky jam session whose lukewarm production values add a "found music" overtone to proceedings. It's like someone happened to catch this weird Igor-helmed cult in the middle of some sort of strange ritual and happened to have a tape recorder handy. As I understand it, this was the soundtrack to a ballet, and like other freakout dance tracks from the era such as Soft Machine's Spaced I think it loses something from not having the dancers there to perform for you whilst you listen to it; on its own, it lacks a certain frisson which some freakout albums from this period manage to capture and some, sadly, don't.