Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Iannis Xenakis - Persepolis + Remixes Edition 1




I found this one somewhere on the web some time ago. This is a 2-CD release with a recording of "Persepolis" on the first disc and the second disk contains remixes (or interpretations) by some of the biggest names and the cream-of-the-crop in contemporary experimental sound art.


Also found on the web are the information and background of "Persepolis":

In 1971, former Iranian dictator Muhammad Reza Shah hosted a lavish and highly choreographed event amidst the ruins of the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis in order to celebrate the 2500th anniversary of Iran's founding by Cyrus The Great. This commemoration of modern Iran's beginnings was part of the Shah's own struggle with the country's increasingly politicized Shi'ite Muslim clerics, led by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, to secularize Iran. Declaring himself to be heir to Cyrus' legacy, the Shah presided over a cast of 6,200 vintage Persian costume-wearing vassals in an outlandish ceremony affirming the Shah's own interpretation of Iranian history, one which paid little deference to Islam.


The third annual Shiraz arts festival was held that same year at Persepolis. In keeping with the 2500th national anniversary celebrations, the Shah commissioned Greek composer and computer music pioneer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) to write a piece of music exalting ancient Persia's aristocratic pre-Islamic religious culture. Selecting Xenakis to author such a work could not have been more symbolically appropriate. A central figure in the development of computer composition, this half-blind former architect, WWII resistance fighter and associate of Le Corbusier evolved a new approach to music, most notably one that employed mathematical probability functions as a compositional methodology.


Titled Persepolis, in honor of the location in which it was to be performed, Xenakis composed a fifty-six minute, eight-track tape piece of musique concrète for the occasion. A noisy, apocalyptic-sounding work distinguished by rising waves of intensity, Persepolis' debut must have been quite an experience for those lucky enough to be in attendance. Persepolis takes on an even greater significance when listened to as a musical work whose purpose was to serve a failed secularist ideology overtaken less than a decade later by a fundamentalist Islamic revolution.


Tracklisting:


Disc 1


1. Persepolis GRM Mix {60:43}


Disc 2

1. Persepolis (remix by Otomo Yoshihide) {9:21}


2. Persepolis (remix titled Per Se by Ryoji Ikeda) {8:36}


3. Persepolis (remix titled Doing By Not Doing by Zbigniew Karkowski) {15:13}


4. Persepolis (remix by Antimatter) {10:00}


5. Persepolis (remix titled Glitche by Construction Kit) {5:00}


6. Persepolis (remix titled Untitled 113 for Iannis Xenakis by Francisco Lopez) {10:05}


7. Persepolis (remix titled Whorl by Laminar) {7:06}


8. Persepolis (remix by Merzbow) {7:01}


9. Persepolis (remix by Ulf Langheinrich) {7:34}

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