INVISIBLE CONNECTIONS

I very rarely give any albums 1 star but this deserves it.Vangelis likes to be enigmatic and this is about as enigmatic as you get. It's truly wierd avante garde stuff,has nothing to do with music (to me) and one can only wonder why he bothered.Apparently the album was released in Japan under the name 'Meditation' which explains a bit.To fans of progressive rock I suggest you avoid this.And if you do buy it don't say I didn't warn you!!

While not a completely successful attempt to produce an album of Electroacoustic or Acousmatic music, this is certainly light years ahead of "Beaubourg", which suffered from a very monochromatic soundworld. As far as I can tell, this is the only Deutsche Grammophon label album ever released by a "non-Classical" artist. The only thing that this album has in common with Progressive Rock is the fact that synthesizers and percussion instruments are being used to create the music. Call it free-form or avant-garde if you like. I like the fact that there is a lot of studio trickery (reverb, panning, etc.) used here, and to great effect.

When I started listening to Progressive Rock at its inception, I also listened to a lot of experimental electronic music (Stockhausen, Varese, Carlos, Subotnick, etc.). I always thought that most Prog fans, being more open-minded and intelligent than the average listener, would appreciate well-done experimental stuff. However, some of my friends from the 70's have become musically conservative. When I play some modern Electroacoustic stuff like Robert Normandeau (who did one piece sampled from bits of Prog classics) or Gilles Gobeil, they invariably say "That's just too weird!" Which, of course, is what most people think the first time they hear Progressive Rock!!!!

Anyway, there are a few used copies of this album floating around. If you're feeling musically adventurous, you could do a lot worse than giving this a try.

One of the most obscure and hard to find Vangelis CD's. There's a reason for this, as the other reviews pointed out, and that's because the music within doesn't match the style most people think about when they hear his name. This CD contains mostly long, droning, electronic and percussive sounds, often processed with deep, gorgeous reverberation. The compositions are not for the uninitated. They contain no melody, little noticable rhythm, and are frequently open key, or serial toned (12-tone), styled contemporary music. It took me several listens to get the hang of this album, and that's what I think turned off most of his fans. But those that do listen, and allow the music to grow on them, will find that it's not just aimless noise, but very thought out and planned.

This is his worst album with "Beaubourg": it is absolutely monotonous and experimental! All through this album, you hear keyboards notes echoed at infinity: you listen to some echoed notes until another couples of ones come out! Atmospheric, would you say? Yes, but how boring and repetitive! You hear that with hi-fi headphones and say: "Wow! the sound and effects are good, but after 2 listens, you get quite saturated! If you want to test the quality of your speakers, then this is THE album, but if you want to listen something complex, structured, elaborated, then all I have to say is "Stay away from this record": minimalism is even too much to describe this insignificant music. Shall I add: the melody and the rhythm are ABSOLUTELY absent here!

Rating: 1.5 stars

My explanation is very simple. This record is not for regular listening, very near to John Cage´s works (minimal and empty of all kind of tune) but, if you like Blade Runner, this album is the most aprox. of all.

(actually 0 stars)

I bought this album about five years ago while going through a major Vangelis discovery. This disc like no other before turned out to be a complete disappointment. Basically it is a sequence of reverbations (no tones, nor rythms, nor structure). Having heard, and enjoying "Beaubourg", before this listen I eagerly awaited some kind of CHANGE! You would think that with three tracks listed that there would be some discrepency among the pieces, but alas Vangelis stayed consistent and provided about 38 minutes of nothingness, which I assume was the point.

I cannot help but believe that this was some sort of joke proposed by the composer to see if people will actually pay good money for absolutely NOTHING! I unfortunately fell for the gag, hopefully none of you will.

Invisible Connections comes years after Beaubourg but has the same vibe... I've always been into the "Musique Concrète" of Pierre Henry, Pierre Schaeffer etc. and it is always good to hear - be it more commercialised - music in a similar mood...

I have never like Vangelis after "China", except for"Soil Festivities" and this one... There is absolutely nothing progressive left to Vangelis... But this one definitely still had a soul.

Put this in the same pile as Beauborg: extreme-minimalistic-avant-garde-ambient-soundscape-experiment.

Vangelis is an experimentalist. That's what makes his music progressive. The trouble with experiments is that they don't always go to plan. This album is missing any actual music, instead utilising various fancy effects to achieve the desired effect: I couldn't pick out any melodies, rhythms or moments of genuine beauty. I couldn't work out which time signatures it used. Did it use more than one time signature? Was it even written in a time signature? Was it even written?

I'm getting distracted by my obsession with time signatures. The point is, it's not music in the traditional sense. Progressive music isn't really "normal" music. Invisible Connections makes progressive music seem normal.

This is the sort of album you'd expect to hear playing in a modern art museum. At the Tate Modern or somewhere. Though I can derive little pleasure from this album, it can still be appreciated as art. It's not a set of three-minute pop songs. I wouldn't call this album "bad" - just different.

I wouldn't listen to this album for pleasure; I would, however, listen to this album if I was researching the history of avant-garde and experimental music.

I find it odd that Vangelis chose to do some minimalist electronica for his debut on the premium classical label Deutsche Grammophon. It seems counter-intuitive. Rambling percussion, tremulous flights of single tones, soft rumbling drones, are what you will find here. In one way, it is reminiscent of Beaubourg, but then again, has Vangelis ever really repeated himself with a recording? At the very least, the sound quality is superb, especially the cymbals. There is no music in the traditional sense here, but only soundscapes. The first and title track is the best out of the three. It is also the longest. It begins in a promising way, with an understated rhythm pattern with an electronic wah kind of tone. Knowing the composer, this would seem to be an introduction presaging some orchestral flourish or crescendo, but the piece doesn't go there. It doesn't go anywhere. In some ways this rhythm serves as both a background and the music itself. It meanders in an unfocused but not unpleasant way. The tones remain electronic in nature. Nothing definite comes forth until the last few minutes when a few high trebly notes rise up, waking the listener up to the fact that not a whole lot has been going on for quite some time. The listener has been brought into this minimal world and we are now reminded that there is more to existence than this. Vangelis has walked a fine line here to make something so electronic, so minimal, so ambient, that the listener can engage in the sound or not and still have much the same experience.

The next two pieces are of similar nature. Atom Blaster is more upfront in its syncopated minimal patterning but it is not as absorbing as Invisible Connections. Thermo Vision is almost as long as the title track, but I can never remember exactly what happens in it, because nothing really does.

To be honest, I am not sure what to make of it all. The album is neither here nor there. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It is like a Zen koan: What is the sound of one synthesizer before it creates any sound? It is merely there, but there is simply not that much "there" there. The space between the sounds is what is important here, but quite frankly, I don't find that space very interesting. Though intriguing in its own way, I cannot say I really enjoy this album. What I like about Vangelis' music is the richness of the orchestrations, the subtlety of the textures, the delicacy, the grandeur, and the beauty of the melodies. Invisible Connections has none of that. In fact, it doesn't have much of anything. Yet, it is still intriguing. . .

This album to is pretty much in the vein of « Soil Festivities ». Vangelis seriously dug into the ambient and new age spheres for "Soil" and "Invisible Connections" is a pure electronic prog album IMHHO. It sounds minimalist during the long opening number and can be related to the early TD ("Zeit") but less appealing.

This means that the music from this work is quite experimental as well and totally lacks in melodic passages. For those who were expecting a more commercial work, it won't be for this time.

To a certain extent, this album shares the obscure and avant-garde atmosphere from "Beaubourg" which didn't leave a great mark in my memory to say the least. I guess that most of traditional Vangelis fans will be perplexed while listening to this "Connections".

The minimalism portrayed during the title track is again repeated for the second track ("Atom Blaster"). Nothing virtually happens here. The transition to the last track is unnoticeable: some sort of all of the same. No big deal actually.

So, rating is tough: between one and two stars depending on my mood. I guess that I am quite positive today?two stars.

Deutsche Grammophon is a label specialized in classical music, so why did they decide to produce an album of an artist who is totally unable to read a music sheet is a sort of mistery.

However, what Vangelis has done is pure "Electronic music". Let's give it a definition first:

When the soundtrack of the SciFi movie "The Forbidden Planet" was realized, the authors weren't officially authors, so they didn't have the possibility to give a title to their music and be recorded as authors. But they invented a genre. Their music influenced at tleast all the SciFi movies for decades after so if I only were able to remember their names, I'd suggest them for proto-prog.

Vangelis succeded about 30 years after. This album is the most experimental after Beaubourg, but while the first was unstructured and its few melodic parts were not fitting well with the rest of the album, here we have an attempt to make music from electricity.

If you are in the right state of mind it's possible that this music does something for you, but if not, you won't survive to the first five minutes, regardless the starting point, as the music is almost the same throughout the whole album.

I have listened to it in the "right" mood, so I'd like to give it a "sufficient" rating, but to be honest, there are better ways to spend money, also with Vangelis so I can't rate it more than two stars. It's experimental but absolutely not poor. Saying "For fans only" is a valid sentence for fans of experimentalism, not for fans of the usual Vangelis.

It's light years better than Beaubourg, but it's not enough for the 3rd star. If you like the OST of "The Forbidden Planet" you may like this, too.

This album really has "Invisible Connections" to music, in my opinion. No "formal music" at all. It has three tracks of random noises, isolated keyboard notes, no chords, some percussion instruments sounds, some silences, all repeated with some echoes added. The three tracks are very similar, and they sound like a continuous piece of sound with not variety at all. A very strange release from Vangelis, which surprisingly has some interesting moments only thanks to Vangelis`s talent. In fact, it is a very easy album to review due to the "uniformity" of its content. I could listen to the three tracks of this album thanks to some people who uploaded them to be listened in youtube. So, at the same time, it was very easy to find this album there. I was very curious to listen to it. Well. My curiosity has been satisfied.

It is also a very strange release from Vangelis because it is very atypical and very different from some of his albums. Very experimental. It also is a very strange release because it was released by a Classical Music label (his only album released by Deutsche Grammophon), a label which also released some albums by other experimental artists like Karlheinz Stockhausen, some of them which I have listened to. I am not really a fan of this kind of Experimental / Avant Garde music, but sometimes it is interesting for me to listen to this kind of "music".

I still have to listen to other albums by Vangelis that I still have not listened yet to say that this is his most "obscure" album. It is very strange, but not bad.

For collectors / fans only.

The other unlistenable Vangelis album. That's the usual knee-jerk gloss on this 1985 oddity: one of only a few truly challenging efforts by the otherwise easy-on-the-ears Greek keyboard artist. Comparisons are typically made to his amorphous "Beaubourg" album (1978), but this equally enigmatic lab-test is miles ahead of the random tonalities of that earlier journey, and light-years removed from the middlebrow classical-synth soundtracks that made his fortune.

The difference between the two albums is obvious in the wider diversity of instruments: acoustic piano, percussive allsorts, and a variety of atmospheric synthesizers. You can likewise hear it in the more generous production, given incredible spatial depth by a heavy application of studio reverb. The end result is an unsettling 40-minute evocation of the empty space between distant stars, at times recalling the minimalism of Brian Eno, minus the soothing pre-natal calm of Eno's better ambient doodles.

But the album can also be occasionally playful, in a deadpan art-installation sort of way. After the awesome space-drift of the 18-plus minute title track, the balance of the album (Side Two of the original LP) descends to the extraterrestrial landscapes of "Atom Blaster" and "Thermo Vision", without actually touching solid ground. Both tracks call to mind the efforts of a nerdy alien repairman testing old TV vacuum tubes: bleep......blorp......bloink......etc, with the silences between each random note even more compelling than the notes themselves. The famed Vangelis soundtrack for the movie "Blade Runner" might have sounded a lot like this, if the film had been a Jacques Tati comedy set on a space station slowly orbiting the planet Neptune.

In retrospect it makes sense that the LP first appeared under the bright yellow logo of the Deutsche Grammophon classical music label. The album should rightfully be segregated from the main sequence of other Vangelis recordings, sharing more common ground with the cosmic-Teutonic soundscapes of early Klaus Schulze and Edgar Froese, or the primitive electronics of Karlheinz Stockhausen: a DG label-mate, briefly. But even lacking the usual melodic crutches the sound is still pure Vangelis, worth a listen when in a receptive (i.e. patient) frame of mind.