995
Album title: The City
Artist: Vangelis
Nationality: Greek
Year: 1990
Genre: Instrumental/New Age/Electronic
Chronology: 13 of 20
What this album means to me: It’s really different. I am a big Vangelis fan and I loved the way he put this together. It’s very atmospheric after the mostly spacey
Direct
Highlights: Morning Papers, Twilight, Procession
Lowlights: Good to See You
Lyric of the album: N/A
From my teenage years I loved Vangelis’s music, having first heard it on Carl Sagan’s documentary series
Cosmos. This I found different to his usual work, melding as it does instrumental passages with ambient sounds, voices, recordings and sound effects to give the idea of the city of the title. There are footsteps, traffic sounds, ringing telephones and washing over it all the gentle, almost new-age music the late Greek genius produced so effortlessly, as if it flowed organically from his brain to his fingers and to the keyboard. It’s hard to listen to this and not see in your mind the images of a city, at first as dawn breaks, then going through the day and finally as the sun sets, and to all but feel the warm breeze, the fading dawn and then later the stars twinkling in the heavens as night descends. It’s very relaxing.
I could probably do without the rather long (nearly seven minutes) piece set in an office, and based around one side of a telephone conversation, but that aside this album is one I play through all the way, and it’s not a long one either. Starts and ends well, and has some great material in between. Almost a case of field recordings, though I don’t know if those sounds were created on his synthesiser; they may have been. But a fine album and it shows once again how versatile the man could be, switching from cinematic historical soundtrack to outer space sounds and then coming right back to Earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPpJbgod_k
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