[CP 210-211 CD] Kyriakos Sfetsas; Smog, Musique Electroacoustique

Despite the all-time top-ten C.P. GOAT title "Greek Electronic Music-1" & it's counterpart "Works of Electronic Music", the series has seen precious little Greek Early Electronic Music. Attempts to secure copies of key Nikiforos Rotas, Nikos Mamagakis, & Dragatakis Koutouki sides have been futile for some time, until one of the key C.P. cabal struck gold in the form of this epic double-LP Tape Music suite by Greek Composer Kyriakos Sfetsas, released alongside the two Roland Hollinger LPs on the French Scorpios label in early 1974. 

Touted, dubiously perhaps, as "one of the first pieces written for four-channel tape in the world", Sfetsas' score for the Ballet "Smog" is a wonder of arbitrarily layered Analogue Synth patches & gated electric organ filigree, coming in somewhere between the drone-psych undertones of It's "Viaje", the raw concrète sprawl of Jean-Claude Eloy's majestic "Shanti" & "Gaku-No Michi" sets, and the burbling, modular automatons of Conrad Schnitzler, Pierre Henry's "Mise En Musique" & Carter Thomas' "Sonoma". 

This is one of those pieces that, much like Dariush Dolat-Shahi's "Electronic Music, Tar, and Sehtar", combines a number of ideas that I've been working with personally for the past few years into a combination that is far more pleasing than anything I've personally been able to muster; which is both frustrating & entirely amazing - astonishing to me that this has lain dormant for so long! One of the absolute highlights of the series thus far...