The works of Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) cannot be overestimated within the contexts of either contemporary composition, the avant-garde, and the developments of both musique concréte and electronic music. As part of the same era that produced fellow sonic adventurists such as John Cage, Pierre Schaefer, and Stockhausen, and continuing a lineage that can establish correlations through the American academe of Morton Subotnick, Milton Babbitt, and Pauline Oliveros directly to the eventualists hunched over laptops worldwide, there remains something about Xenakis' work that still holds up remarkably well under scrutiny. His more "classical" conjugations aside, the man's electronic experiments remain eminently listenable today, his patterning and textures particularly resonant in the ghostigital effluvium etched by the crews of Mego, Raster-Noton, Mille Plateaux and other post-glitch instigators.
The two pieces on display here represent Xenakis at his most confrontational. The stupendous "Hibiki Hana Ma" is certainly not for the faint-hearted; out of the noisy vacuum of its atonal heart pours great clotted slabs of sound, brash, bellicose, extraordinarily nuanced yet of such epic gradations it becomes a truly visceral, if frightening, experience. Sometimes the yawning mass simulates the liftoff of a thousand jets; at points along the piece's 17-minute axis are interspersed chorals of homicidal strings, the sounds of xylophones whirling about in cyclotrons, the whirring that machines make as their power is gradually dialed down. The sound totally envelops you in its shuddering miasma, sonics roaring out of the stereo field in three dimensions (this is a piece of work sorely requiring a superfine sound system to do it justice). Alternately identifiable and alien, scary and portentous, the molten core that eventually erupts could teach the likes of Merzbow a thing or two, but unlike Masami Akita, Xenakis' admirable restraint never allows his sounds to degenerate into total anarchy.
Of the second of two works on this reissue (superbly re-mastered in all respects, incidentally), "Polytope de Cluny" is Xenakis at his most grotty, abandoning the rocket booster rush of "Hibiki" for a panoply (symphony?) of squeak, thrust, and parry that wouldn't sound out of place on any of a dozen Erstwhile-related sides. Here Xenakis puts his textures through the proverbial wringer, desperately distraught noises creating untold contradictions both about and of themselves: scurrying mice squeezed between a giant letter-press, running water mutated beyond recognition, weird armies of percussive matter fighting amongst themselves...or perhaps a juxtaposition of all three. Perhaps not as rewarding as the previous work, this nonetheless illustrates Xenakis as a the premier madman of his time, ignoring the bourgeois tendencies that pulled his less capable colleagues into the mainstream, content with plying his trade into far murkier realms. All of which makes this document not only relevant to our turbulent years but also practically essential for anyone curious about Xenakis' maverick ways. This stuff makes most staid "classical" music sound, in the parlance of Brian Eno, like dead fish.
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