Igor Wakhevitch
Docteur Faust

"Long preamble more or less relevant"

The new generation of music enthusiasts has a big disadvantage, the ability to find anything their spoiled ears desire or are curious to listen to, with two clicks and a few minutes of waiting.
With a little patience, you can find unthinkable records, of great rarity, otherwise hardly obtainable.
A fortune, you might say.

Thanks to these unlimited possibilities, we audacious masochists often like to immerse ourselves in mountains of records to listen to, for love of this wonderful Art, for study, for curiosity, for obligation.
We will rarely see collections of original records (even fewer vinyls) surpass the vast archives of MP3s that every individual in 2011 possesses. We have listened to more records in the last decade than myriad of old longhairs have ever done in their lifetime.
The result is a gradual and involuntary loss of the desire, the concentration, and the predisposition to listen, of pure and genuine love towards Music, even towards the simple and bare sound of an instrument. We have lost the primal pleasure of listening to records, of being cradled or overwhelmed by their vibrations, the pleasure of placing the needle on the old hypnotic black platter, or we have never experienced it.
Once upon a time, vinyl was a cult object, listening to a single record lasted months, it was praised, revered as a sacred object, marked an important period of our existence, became an integral part of us.

We have screwed up our brains.
Constantly in a hurry, under pressure, we do one thing thinking about another, pretending to listen, to love, to live.
We run fast, ours is a wild run, without a destination, but above all without a path, we run haphazardly behind a system that long ago began its personal countdown.
Damned automaton freaked out.

Indeed, in a world where one does not even have 10m to devote to oneself or to one's children, carving out space for careful listening can be a problem.
Even if we find the space, we would hardly have the chance to turn up the volume as we please.
If we are lucky enough to do so, most of the time we will find ourselves grappling with a stereo system that could compete only with the speakers of the first GameBoy.
Speakers with which we will listen to Beethoven's Ninth.
We will eventually find ourselves forced to wear earphones to find a damn corner of privacy in this oppressive, sick world.

We listen to entire discographies without dedicating them the right time, the necessary listens, the due attention, we listen while we roam the web, read a book, drive, have sex, write a review. We justify ourselves by remembering that Music, after all, is nothing but the soundtrack of our lives, forgetting however that the latter is often capable of permanently changing life, altering who we are and will be. We are the soundtrack of Music, we, its favorite sitcom.

We boast of knowing, we like to do so. Many listens in our life have also been in relation to subsequent boasting. Why deny it.
We develop that “formidable” Scaruffian intuition that makes us believe we are the sole possessors of the truth, of the necessary experience to judge entire works by giving just a couple of listens, maybe while we leave some Likes in some stupid social network.

Once we have reached the fake level of SuperListener, it's hard to find the way back, after millions of records and billions of hours dedicated to them, it becomes increasingly difficult to find works still able to astonish us, to move us, as years pass their number inevitably becomes more limited, in Music, as in life.

Docteour Fast was undoubtedly one of the last great exceptions for me, discovered not long ago, thanks to a comment by Jargon on an old review of Magma (whom I sincerely thank also for Aurora, by Theatre Du Chene Noir), found with two clicks, without even having to force the search, crazy stuff.

I continue listening for days. People around me are beginning to wonder if I have been possessed by some strange being coming from Kobaia. After all, they have been wondering for years. The truth is this record has something magnetic, spectral, alien, from which it is not easy to detach.

"(non) Review"

Well then, if you think that after all this chattering, I am crazy enough to go into detail about this grand and unsettling French work, produced by a country I have never had much sympathy for, you are on the wrong track, my friends.
What I will tell you is that the Igor in question is a French pianist/composer of Russian origin, and that after the release of three highly experimental albums on the cutting edge of electronic use (Logos 1970, this Docteur Faust 1971, and Hathor 1974), he reached his highest popularity by writing music for Être Dieu, a magnificent work by Salvador Dalí dated 1974 (2 hours and 26 minutes, divided into 6 tracks).

As for the album, Jargon’s comment (no offense meant) is the only comment I feel I can report.

(referring to Köhntarkösz)

"there's a product that surpasses it for imagination, anger, wickedness, magic, dreaminess, malignant evocation, and angelicism. I'm talking about Docteur Faust by Igor Wakhevitch, a 1971 album unparalleled worldwide."

Regards.

Aimanation - 0.25
Materia Prima - 10.12
Eau Ardente - 4.24
Tenebres (Walpirgis) - 4.52
Matines - 3.53
Licornes - 2.33
Sang Pourpre - 3.55

Tot: 30.02

Igor Wakhevitch: Keyboards, Synthesizers

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