Favourite Igor Wakhevitch album

philippe 
SPECIAL COLLABORATOR
Content Development & Krautrock Team

 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.

 Another brilliant album from this unknown artist who's ratings are surprisingly high in the P.A. It's just a pity so few folk have heard of him.

The opener 'Ergon' sounds like that bit in 'The Ten Commandments' where the Red Sea is split in two by Charlton Heston from where he scarpers to safety. Full of reverbed female vocals that are enough to give you the heebie-jeebies.

Talking of reverb - there's a lot more of it in 'Mineral - Vegetal - Animal' with wailing male and female singing reminiscent of the monolith scene in 'Space Odyssey'. Sorry about the film comparisons, but they ARE accurate!

This ain't no cheapo first outing recorded onto a home cassette. It's well recorded and sounds BIG! The array of instrumentation is fantastic and there isn't a dull moment - it's far too intense for that.

There are very few pop or rock instruments utilised. From what I hear it's all orchestral drums, electronic whines and drones, treated classical instruments and hugely echoed vocals. Most of 'Logos' sounds like it belongs in a 'Hammer' horror film but in a more experimental way.

Towards the end you get quite a lot of mid section Floyd 'Saucerful of Secrets' and 'Ummagumma'

Almost five stars marred somewhat by the one use of electric guitar near the finish.

I just wish I'd discovered this years ago. Great album.