by Doug Laustsen
When I first sought out Xenakis’ music, I made a trek to my favorite new music record shop. I discovered that the few albums present in the racks lacked the details I hoped would give me an idea of which album to pick. So, naturally I picked the album with the coolest artwork. On the back of the album was a picture of Xenakis looking like a mad scientist at work over a large sound board.
The music on that album, Mode’s release of the electroacoustic work La Legende d’Eer, sounded like the work of a mad scientist. The label, I also found seemed to fit the composer pretty well – armed with well refined complex mathematical principles, he was working to create a sonic landscape previously unthought-of. I’m sure his detractors would relish in the idea of his music being the auditory equivalent of Frankenstein, but to me his music is able to find a distinct balance between the grotesque and gorgeous all at once. The bursts of motion and angular a-lyrical sounds – both in the electro-acoustic works and ones for conventional instruments – sound like the way the world we live in looks. I wouldn’t expect anything much else from an architect, of course.
Doug Laustsen is a musician and host of Endlesss Possibilities on WRSU-FM in New Brunswick, NJ. He blogs at epmusic.
