Iannis Xenakis
Persepolis

In the 1950s, the United States committed the first of their blunders in foreign policy by overthrowing the socialist government of Mossadeq in Persia, today's Iran. They put the Shah in power, a corrupt puppet of theirs who, due to his mismanagement, sparked the rise and wrath of Islamic fundamentalism. The latter became quite a problem, and the Shah, in the last decade of his remaining power, tried to invent a way to secularize Iran...

One of these occasions was the 2500th anniversary of the ruins of Persepolis. Something radical, innovative was needed, also to show the world that Iran was still, after all, a modern country. The choice of how to celebrate that festival was commissioned to Iannis Xenakis, who probably also had little sympathy for the Shah of Persia.

Iannis Xenakis: anti-Nazi partisan, blind in one eye after a gunfight, later siding against the British in his country's civil war, Greece, then fled to France, which welcomed him as a son, a student of the architect Le Corbusier, but above all a pioneer of computer-generated music, snubbed in the twelve-tone music circles but magnificent, based his electronic and non-electronic music on probability calculus ("Stochastic Music").

Xenakis was the right person for what Shah Rezha Phalavi wanted. This was soon arranged. Xenakis visited the ruins of Persepolis, and composed totally electronic music, which would be broadcast in 1971 from 59 strategically positioned speakers, accompanied by suggestive light shows.

The music on this CD starts quietly, it's an electronic beam with slow but inexorable mutations that take you far away. It seems like the wind that, indeed, blows among the ruins of that stronghold of a now gone civilization. More psychedelic than Stockhausen, less serious than Berio of the sequenzas, this album will remain a milestone of 1970s experimentation

Oh yes, then we all know how it ended for the Shah...

The edition of Persepolis I have also includes a CD of remixes, by authors who have little to do with maestro Xenakis: people like Merzbow or Francisco Lopez or Otomo Yoshihide and others have taken a fragment of this work and devastated it with noisy aesthetics. Let's be clear, noise aesthetics are fine with me, but in the context of this important work, it fits poorly.

Xenakis died at 79 in January 2001, after a long illness.