Diamorphoses / Concret Ph / Orient Occident / Bohor

Iannis Xenakis’s early electroacoustic works define already the compositional space he is using later in his mature, almost one-hour long works like Persepolis or La Légende d’Er. After arriving in Paris as a Greek refuge in 1947, Xenakis quickly found a work as construction engineer with the architect Le Corbusier. He tried in vain for several years to become a member of the Groupe De Musique Concrète (GRM) and thus to gain access to the electroacoustic studios at the French radio. Pierre Schaeffer accepted him only when not only Messiaen pushed for it, but also the conductor Hermann Scherchen lobbied for him
Diamorphoses was his first attempt at composing musique concrète and was to remain his only one. He carefully recorded small sounds and worked on them systematically in weeks of tape-snapping. But he also combined sound material that presumably came from the GRM’s Sonothèque, and here his fable for powerful sound masses was already apparent. Concret Ph originally was a sound installation: as Le Corbusier’s assistant, he had been allowed to completely design the architecture of the pavilion for the Brussels World’s Fair 1958, but his music was only to serve as a break filler between the repetitions of the main attraction: the Poème électronique by Edgar Varèse with projections by Le Corbusier
Under the title Interlude Sonore, Xenakis created a tape consisting of the most minimal tape snippets sticked together and got something that sounded almost like the tickling of glowing coal. Xenakis anticipated granular synthesis in analog tape form: the combination of little sound grains giving birth to a new sound. Orient Occident is an extract from music for a documentary film about the encounter of Eastern and Western cultures, shortened by about half