IGOR WAKHEVITCH

"Ouvertüre und Erster Auftritt" Thunderous narration and windy squalls compete with crashes and low synthesizer lead. An ominous choir enters. After a spell of narration, it sounds like extraterrestrials are firing lasers in an operating factory. This opus also contains dark orchestral movements, splashes of cymbals, and shrill feminine vocals.

"Zweiter Auftritt oder Kampf mit dem Engel" Bizarre percussion and dramatic speaking opens this second part. A lot of it is barely audible. Vocal passages are extremely eccentric. Operatic singing and strings make up the end.

"Dritter Auftritt und Erster Abgang" Menacing strings and the sound of a cockerel underscore a foreboding voice. Clucking continues. One might as well be listening to a sermon in barnyard. After the seventeen mark is the first trace of honest-to-god music. It's rock, and it's good! It is a stark and welcome contrast from the tedium to which the past hour was devoted. It is a shame that it goes away in favor of more talk, though eventually a shadowy organ arrives.

"Im Traum" This is a cut from someone's Halloween mix tape, complete with gales and moaning people. And it has dungeon sounds. I think. The music (?) morphs into something pleasantly cinematic halfway through.

"Vierter Auftritt oder Das Glaubensbekenntnis" Sounding like something from a made-for-TV fantasy movie, this has exotic chants and unusual sibilating. Arguing (I think) comes later. More talk (and more talk) follows. A breezy bit of nonsense takes up after a while. Then there's the circus music with the blurting of a word I don't know. Then footsteps. Then more talk. Then quiet.

"Finale und Zweiter Abgang" A thick choir opens the final movement. Much of this consists of distant strings. Piano bashing ensues. There are further cinematic qualities that represent one of the rare high points of this nearly three hour drudgery.

'Les Fous D'or' is an avant garde opera replete with wobbly Eve Brenner soprano vocals. Add to this some cello and stabbing trumpet all drenched in reverb and you'll have some idea what this strangest of all Wakhevitch albums sounds like.

The cover artwork sums it up well. It sounds how it looks - like a mentally deranged 'Peter and the Wolf'. Doom laden piano chords appear half way through which are guaranteed to put shivers up your spine.

Frederic Lodeon and Henry Smith's vocals gradually emerge from mid album beginning off just unusual, but steadily becoming more and more bizarre the further into the album you get, particularly on 'Ritual of the Masters of the Doll' where you'll be left looking over your shoulder nervously, expecting ghosts to emerge from walls.

This is the kind of music I'd expect the baddie from 'Blair With Project' would listen to in a deep, dark forest all alone, just waiting on a victim.

A fascinating piece of strangeness which is continually captivating and ultra odd with its mixture of electronics and opera.

Opening on the almost-sidelong title track (23-mins+), we discover a synth and kb-only (with some possible percussions) track where dramatic vocal eructions (and eruptions) and echoed & looped spoken words are providing haunting and dronal soundscapes, where oscillators, sequencers and phasers reign supreme. The short Fruit Garden is an electric piano piece. On the flipside, the 12- mins+ Eriador opens on monophonic synth lines, but gets dubbed soon enough multi-echoed, but overstays its welcome until some organ keys add some contrast and provoke a total change of ambiance for the second half. Monks In The Snow returns to the Zeit/Atem realm, but beware of the screechy and strident arrows piercing your armour, despite the soothing presence of wind noises. The closing Ramallah's Road returns to the piano, but this time acoustic, before jumping electric and electronic.

This last inaptly-titled Let's Start (by the end, maybe?) is one of my fave of Igor's works aftr Faust and tied with Logos, but despite its minimalist ambient nature, it could indeed be a good starting point to his discography. Whatever happened to Igor??

Of course, you'll also find the two "esoteric" schmaltz albums of Hathor and Fous D'Or albums, which don't find much grace (especially the latter) to my eyes or ears. We'll call this his esoteric phase. Missing from this Donc boxset, supposedly gathering all of Igor's 70's works, is his Salvatore Dali collaboration from 74, and if I haven't heard it, it's rumoured to sound a bit like the Nagual album and its surrealist soundscapes. As for the closing Let's Start, it is one of his better works. The last two art h closest to Tangerine Dream IMHO.

On the boxset and booklet presentation front, there are many infos lacking, like line-ups, the liner notes being weird, esoteric, voluntarily evasive and bizarre and uninformative. The boxset's artwork is somewhat reminiscent of Igor's debut album Logos. The six discs comes in white paper envelopes with a number (fortunately chronologically sequenced) and colours roughly reminiscent of the album's artworks (except notably for the Fous D'Or, which is yellow instead of green). The front artworks are all assembled in one big folded page, but there is not much else. It's not like one would have a choice, though. From my informations, the albums are unavailable separately in CD format, so the boxset might just be the only way to go, unless finding the original vinyls.

Clearly rid of the intrusive vocal interference of the last two albums, Nagual's almost-all instrumental and mainly-electronic music gets all the space it needs to develops its wings and shows its charms, despite letting some room for acoustic instruments interventions (both string instruments and piano). The unconventional vocals are mainly concentrated in a short section of the early musical progression. If there is a haunting shamanic drums sequence that can give you a tribal ambiance, it's followed a bit later by some kind of semi- celtic jig, it sms to lack a clear musical direction, especially when confronting the titles and their sonic contents.

The minimalist piano and electronic drone of Never Poem has a Terry Riley influence that gives an avant-garde flavour that otherwise lacked in many parts throughout the course of the album. However, I'm not exactly sure how this all relates to the semi-Chinese and semi- medieval acoustic string device used in Smile Of The Wolf piece to the supposedly Mayan mythology, but the Tangerine Dream-like synth layers of the closing Chirakan piece is not really Meso-American-sounding either.

A vast improvement of its predecessor, Nagual is still a very intriguing concept (well matter of speech, really), precisely because it doesn't have any logical explanation to the conceptual soundscapes, but then again, not everything needs explaining. One of his better later albums, this is also one of his less-logical one as well, despite not straying from his general musical quest.

Opening on some kitschy French-spoken narrative, the Cornerstone side features some lengthy soothing and cosmic electronic soundscapes, interrupted by dumb liturgical mass lectures. A while later, one has to "suffer" some Devil's Trill violin lines with some agonizing diva (Eva Brenner) yodels, rendering the listening particularly difficult if you're afraid of ridiculous and sinister rising-from-the-dead ambiances. The Fous D'Or flipside is not much easier, because the agonizing diva hasn't croaked yet and she's billing overtime hours on your brains' patience budget. Even the 'tronic soundscapes are patience-grinding and are fast eroding it, especially once the newborn cries, loony laughter and clown-horns are spilling from your speakers.

To be honest, this is easily Igor's lesser and more ridiculous work, mixing French narratives and declamations with English titles. To think it took two years for Igor to generate such nonsense is actually just as mind-boggling as the music is, but this is not a positive thought. Best forgotten if you ask me, but you might not have a choice in avoiding it, because it comes in the 6-discs Don boxset, but no doubt it will stay at the bottom of the box.

In some ways, Hathor is Igor's gloomiest album ever, often sinister, but not really scary: actually if you're an atheist, this is pretty laughable. You could imagine a clown-ier or kitschy Shub-Niggurath (for those who know them), but the quality of the music and soundscapes avoid ridicule or pastiche. The nearly-symphonic electronic soundscapes opening the album could have you think of Tangerine Schulze intro with aerial choirs, but soon enough the 'grandiose' narratives pull you in the satan-derived concept, before diving us in the sea of oscillating and pulsing electronic sounds and hypnotizing rhythms of Grand Sabbath and Rituel De Guerre. A bit later, the crowd-rising harangues and the Latin mass incantations are downright silly, and will most-likely make you reach for that ffwd button on your remote control, past the first few listens. Once the music returns, we still have to deal with dronal choirs, but the sinister farce has stopped, to leave a haunting soundscape of Amenthi, but it overstays its welcome. Howling owls greet you in the night-ending dawn (Aurora), with some soothing liturgical organ.

A thankfully fairly-short album Hathor might have gained somewhat from being a wordless concept and maybe gain a few more instrumental passages. Indeed past these doubtful conceptual meanderings, we're left with a very groundbreaking electronic soundscape album that can only impress the historically-conscious music-heads. Too bad this would- be masterpiece of an album is littered with esoteric junk, though.

Opening on a kitsch male multi-echoed narration that will turn into spoken female chants and choirs at later stages in the musical concept, Aimentation quickly turn to hypnotic drums and drones along with spacey chants and cosmic noises (keys and guitars). The transition in to the three-part Materia Prima piece is hard to discern, but signalled by Fournier's bass solo. Once the cosmic rock slowly segues away, the music veers to a modern classical symphonic mode, with a full orchestra that should have most Stravinsky, Mussorgsky or Prokofiev fans on the edge of their seat. Whispering vocals open an insanity phase, where illogical musical events reigns supreme, before string-scraping howling spaceship reactors bring you back to hell. Eau Ardente is no less weird with its religious incantations accompanied by firecracker percussions over electronic drones and foghorns.

Gentle harpsichord arpeggios open the Ténèbres piece, before plunging into the Walpurgis gloomy meanders. More harpsichords, this time segueing in wild electric guitar parts and other psychedelic freak outs traits draw you well beyond the most extreme GonG twiddles in the Matines and Licornes pieces. The closing Sang Pourpres ends the album in a more austere fashion, but no-less freaky soundscapes (including flying bullets) scrap their way into your now-numb brains, until its abrupt and unexpected end.

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. Definitely Igor's best suited entry point for rock crowds, Dr Faust is an amazing album that deserves at listen an investigation from every adventurous music freak.

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.