VANGELIS - Rosetta

When in 1799, on the Nile delta at Rosetta (the Latinized name of the ancient Rashid), the captain of the Egyptian Campaign, Pierre-François Bouchard, unearthed the fragment of an Egyptian stele destined to be disputed to this day among France, England and Egypt, it would surely have struck his contemporaries as ironic that, more than two centuries later, his name would be given to a mission conducted through collaboration between European nations. Beset by a failed first launch in 2002, the "Rosetta" project finally lifted off in 2004 thanks to the efforts of the European Space Agency, reaching its goal a full ten years later with the landing of the Philae probe on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2014, before finally concluding on 30 September 2016 with the probe's planned crash.

While other artists and demiurges of electronic music have in the past taken part in space-related initiatives — think of Pink Floyd, who in '69 jammed live on the BBC during the Apollo 11 descent, Brian Eno, called upon in '83 to compose "Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks" for a documentary on the historic Moon landing, or Jean-Michel Jarre, who in '86, for NASA's twenty-fifth anniversary and in commemoration of the Challenger disaster, launched the event-album "Rendez vous" with the Houston live show (later linking up with the Mir space station during his '97 Moscow concert) — this is probably the first time a composer has been asked to decode and accompany a mission in real time through his musical art. In this respect, Vangelis himself is hardly a newcomer: although he cannot claim (unlike John Serrie, self-proclaimed full-time author of space-music) more than a couple of works explicitly rooted in sidereal "imagerie" — namely "Albedo 0.39" from 1976 and the album "Mythodea", performed with choir and orchestra in 2001 before the Temple of Zeus in Athens to celebrate NASA's "Mars Odyssey" mission — over the course of his unbroken musical epic, of undeniably "astronomical" proportions, he has repeatedly led the listener on reconnaissance through euphonic sonic galaxies both "intra-" and "extra-terrestrial", from the more rarefied "Spiral" (1977) to the cyber-nostalgic "Blade Runner" (1982), from the cryogenic "Antarctica" (1983) to the astral baroque of "Voices" (1995).

It was at the invitation of ESA astronaut André Kuipers that, two years after the expanded reissue of the soundtrack to "Chariots Of Fire" produced for the stage version of the film to mark the London Olympics, Vangelis agreed to break his absence from the public scene — spent in the cloistered, if still prolific, asceticism of his home studio — and return to inlaying and engraving visual and mental images with the aid of his personal MIDI system of analogue and digital synthesizers built around the "Direct box" (first put through its paces on the album of the same name back in 1988).

Premiered on ESA's YouTube channel just hours before the Philae lander touched down in November 2014, "Arrival", "Philae's Journey" and "Rosetta Waltz" weren't just commissioned pieces meant to soundtrack a trio of videos made up of photos taken by the probe. Vangelis himself came to realize as much, spotting the seed of a new concept album in those three compositions, pregnant as they were with an already fully formed atmosphere and the core theme of a more "spacious" ceremonial work ready to unfold across ten further movements. Exactly a week after the mission's conclusion, the complete album was released on 23 September 2016, accompanied by a promotional teaser in which, defying his reputation as a reclusive keyboard hermit, Vangelis himself offers terse reflections on music and space exploration, retracing the key stages of Rosetta's journey with the precision and chronological rigor of a documentary hagiography unmatched even by similar projects such as "L'Apocalypse des Animaux" and "La Fete Sauvage", composed between '73 and '76 for Frédéric Rossif's series of nature documentaries.

Although the four majestic opening notes of "Arrival" retain the neoclassical pomp that characterized the central melodies of the "Alexander" soundtrack (even before those of "Mythodea"), it's the emulsive treatment of reverb, elevated to the dignity of an instrument in its own right, along with the return of bubbling Terry Riley-style sequencers woven into an organ reminiscent of the ritual airs of a Philip Glass, that frees the track from the incestuous (figuratively speaking) saga of mannered "Vangelis-style" variants that over the past twenty years have dragged so much new age, chill-out and ambient music into tedium elevated to an art form. Viewed as a "suite", "Rosetta" presents itself much like the notorious stele itself, functioning as a sonic matrix divided into audio-engravings through which to reinterpret the perception of a space that is not only the one traversed over ten years by the probe of the same name, but above all the one generated by the metaphysical vertigo inherent in the notion of the Infinite lurking behind the mission's objective: finding clues to understand the origin of the Solar System through the analysis of the comet.

And it's this all-pervasive sense of "unheimlich", of "cosmic uncanny" born from the approach of a revelation infinitely deferred, that seeps through on a full listen of the work, especially in the more arrhythmic, contemplative tracks like "Starstuff", "Celestial Whispers", "Sunlight" and the hyper-minimalist "Return To The Void", where the earlier Mahlerian fugue of "Elegy" dissolves, and Vangelis seems to describe, with mystical languor, the slow fading of the probe and, by extension, of human consciousness scattering into stellar matter in search of the ultimate meaning of the universe. The melodies and progressions chase one another, mirror each other, and loop back on themselves, in particle-like trails of resonant impressions moving through nebulae of chimes and clangs that, though sampled, still retain the dreamy, vigorous personality of the progressive Vangelis of "Heaven And Hell" (1975) and "China" (1979), busy at work on bells, crotales, cymbals, triangles, timpani and vibraphones.

It's also true that, more than his previous works, this "Rosetta" offers a faithful (and in some ways unflattering) snapshot of the one-man orchestra's creative method, capable of assembling an entire track in a single session and moving on to the next with the assistance of his inseparable sound engineer Philippe Colonna (a case in point is "Perihelion", with its electric guitar wailing impetuously to the point of distortion over choppy Tangerine Dream-style sequencers), at times neglecting the kind of "labor limae" that once gave more structure and substance to the tracks born during the Nemo Studios era in London, when Vangelis would return again and again to a phrase, a single effect or a mix to blend into the sonic architecture the voices of Jon Anderson and Demis Roussos or the sax of Dick Morrissey.

But what sounds most anticlimactic, from a strictly artistic standpoint, is above all the minor-key reworking of the "Alpha" theme for the title track, which drifts for nearly 5 minutes through a wearied replica of the andante of "To The Unknown Man", groping, without ever reaching, toward the dramatic, hypnotic progressive-rock peaks of the 1976 masterpiece. And yet it would take so little — moving Vangelis's setup into the apse of a cathedral, much as Tangerine Dream did in 1975 in those of Coventry, York and Liverpool — to elevate the experience of the work to the reverent listening of a "missa solemnis" played in full for the duration of a service, complete with the more "secular" digressions represented by the antiphrastic little march of "Philae's Descent" (the most functional and deliberately illustrative piece on the whole album) and the insertion of the candid, quasi-Straussian and Kubrickian entr'acte "Mission Accomplie (Rosetta's Walz)".

After all, who better than the Ulysses who set sail more than 50 years ago from Volos toward a human and musical Odyssey with no return, first with Aphrodite's Child, then in ever-shifting solitude at the helm of mutinous orchestral vessels (a condition more Ulyssean than ever), could claim the right to raise his pleonastic hymn to the pilgrimage of a probe destined to be lost after transmitting the data gathered on a wandering rock, keeper of the memory of our galaxy? Like Champollion, who deciphered the three scripts of the stele, Vangelis makes use of music as a universal Esperanto with which to decode those fragments of humanity adrift in the deep space of a consciousness clouded by the eternal present.

"We are part of the universe, and music is its code," Vangelis remarks. "Music is more a Science than an art form (…) but this is too demanding a subject to discuss, and I don't think it's right to talk about it now."

To speak, echoing the silent harmonies of the void, all it takes is "Rosetta" itself.

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15/11/2016