Vangelis
L'Apocalypse Des Animaux

"L'apocalypse des animaux" by Vangelis is one of those soundtracks that has the tremendous advantage of being able to live on its own even without the film's images and, if anything, to encourage those who haven’t seen it to watch it.

Marvelous compositional balances traverse the tracks of this album released in 1973, created by a Vangelis in a state of grace as a musical commentary to the homonymous film by the great Frederic Rossif. As evocative as never before, capable of stirring intense emotions with a vast spectrum of moods, this work is undoubtedly one of the peaks of the Greek artist's musical art and foreshadows the characteristics of true new age, thus ideally anticipating its conclusion.

The seven tracks contained in the original version of the record, indeed, have sounds and rhythms that are one with the nature they draw inspiration from; they convey a mysterious sense of intimate communion between the silent mysteries of the Earth and the creatures that inhabit it (including the human/listener). A precursor of new age then, not so much for the reasons that, many years later, led to the boom—often speculative—of that sound, but for the intellectual drive toward a world that music attempts to celebrate without disrupting its order. And where new age has pretended to manipulate one or more musical genres to express a better evolutionary future from a human perspective, a work like that of Vangelis has simply translated into music the empathies that man experiences in front of other creatures and earthly horizons.

After the title track's introduction, which sounds rather jovial and almost ethnic (as we would say today), one begins a complete immersion into inalienable emotion. "La petit fille de la mer", a splendid, subdued, and crystalline music box that makes you twirl on the waves' ripples, suspended in time between memories and prenatal dreams; "La singe bleu", with its alternation of empty and full spaces, a solo trumpet that gently caresses jazz without ever becoming disjointed; "La mort du loup", which touches the deepest cords of our sensibility with an immensely perfect hymn to pain; "L'ours musicien", a very brief dance halfway between circus and fable. And then the two lengthy tracks dedicated to the elements and the more impersonal visions of the planet and its ancient beating heart, where the sound becomes more magmatic and experimental, approaching the thresholds of contemporary classical music.

Undoubtedly, words are not enough to describe the evocative power of these pieces in strictly visual terms, because when it comes to the death of the wolf or the blue monkey, listening to the music seems to truly materialize before our eyes, the animals living their moment, whether carefree or dramatic, with all the associated emotional and environmental nuances.

A great album of instrumental music, a significant intimate exploit by Vangelis.