Vangelis
Antarctica

Antartica is yet another sound project by Vangelis, recorded at Nemo Studios in London and released in 1983: the year following the soundtracks for the films Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner.

The work, soundtrack of the film "Nankyoku Monogatari," literally "South Pole Story," is released in the USA under the title "Antartica" (shot entirely at the northern tip of Hokkaido in Japan) directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara in 1983.
 
Vangelis dissociates from what might apparently be a plausible composition related to the film, projecting the listener into a context of hypnotic calm, transcending the cold and evocative atmospheres that the locations imprint.
In these moments, with contours as dynamic as they are dramatic, the artistic aspirations of the composer deliberately use the perceptions derived from contact with the cold Antarctic deserts, materializing through those ancestral intimacies inherent to man, thus moving from warm, occasionally imaginative moments to moments of pure anguish, isolation, and desolation.

The generated empathy paradoxically manages to describe the beauties of a distant and inaccessible land, whose "convergence zone," an iron suboceanic curtain sinking the surface subtropical waters, is nothing other than the first of many bastions wanting climatologically and biologically the continent irreconcilable with the contiguous, certainly more temperate zones. 
A dichotomy resulting from a hidden condition of immobility with deadly traits, yet at the same time evocative and fantastic, in a contrast where the impetuousness of the seas wants to play with ice that seems to overshadow the skies.

Most of the music centers on the sonic cognitions of the main track: "Theme from Antarctica". 
It feels like framing in sequence shot, from a P166DL3, a group of polar bears crossing the whitest ice floes while everything is eagerly captured by the lens, recording the perfection of the lands flown over, moving vertically towards the immense ice walls of the Transantarctic Range, an impregnable fortress from which to have no shelter, ready to explode in all its power.

"Antarctica Echoes" continues the hypnotic sound flow, whose life on those ice deserts evolves in the hardships of a microclimate now plagued by time.
A cold from which to have no shelter, but which in the benevolence of Mother Nature finds those stochastic equilibria in an extreme perfection that, indomitable, reveals its Spartan and surreal elegances.

Kinematic unbinds euphonically, remaining within a kinematic analysis of biological bodies belonging to an extreme microclimate.

"Song of White", watchful and silent, observes the awakening of Antarctic fauna in a warm morning dawn, then exalts in a continuation whose empathies seem to definitively dawn on a continent with alien and vast flavors.

"Life of Antarctica", a sort of sonic oxymoron of "Song of White", a track where the inspirations of Blade Runner are increasingly present, shows a desolate land afflicted by katabatic winds and perpetual ice, whose sound symmetries rise towards cosmic contexts.

Everything seems to stabilize again on the canons of the main track with "Memory of Antarctica", a more minimalist composition compared to the first track.
A silent alien nature transits into the sounds of "Other Side of Antarctica", Sumerian and dark, resurrects the supposed Atlantean descents, once lived on this immense continent, now buried by kilometers of ice, when still the orientation of the Earth's axis (precession of the equinoxes) allowed a part of the continent the climatic conditions necessary for a life... alien.

Deliverance magically closes the journey with a long farewell, while the camera shot closes on the vastness of the Transantarctic Range until reaching the coasts of Ross while vast white walls ride immense oceans on which to shatter.