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Igor Wakhévitch: “Rituel de guerre des esprits de la terre”

From the album Hathor - Lithurgie du souffle pour la résurrection des morts (1973)

At once unique and unclassifiable, the music of Igor Wakhévitch exemplifies the kind of work that tends to fall through the cracks created by our slovenly habits of genre categorization. Born in Provence, France, in 1948, Wakhévitch cut his teeth in the 1960s avant-garde music scene in Paris, studying with such major figures as Pierre Schaeffer and Olivier Messiaen. Over the course of the 1970s, Wakhévitch released six albums exploring an intensely evocative and absolutely distinctive world of sound, in which surrealistic, musique concrète-style sound collages and ethereal choirs mouthing wordless chants share sonic space with minatory synthesizer drones and throbbing, quasi-kosmische sequencer lines.

Wakhévitch’s 1973 album Hathor (subtitled “Liturgy of Breath for the Resurrection of the Dead”) is the nightmarish soundtrack for some imaginary black mass. The dark, ceremonial tenor of the music is nowhere more imposing than in this track, ”Rituel de guerre des esprits de la terre” (“War Ritual of the Earth Spirits”).

Although Wakhévitch’s pedagogical lineage places him squarely in the European post-classical tradition, his work shows an undeniable affinity with the contemporaneous progressive rock currents of the time, down to the album art.  Moments on Hathor such as the penultimate track, “Amenthi,” in particular, recall the psychedelic free-for-all of pre-Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd. This particular influence was likely channeled through Wakhévitch’s friendship with the American minimalist composer Terry Riley, who was also keen to forge links between the classical/experimental and popular music scenes.

In 1974 Wakhévitch was asked by Salvador Dalí to compose the music for the painter’s “opera-poem” Être Dieu (Being God). The result was a singular work of late-surrealist fusion spanning three LPs. It was re-released on CD in 1992. Wakhévitch’s studio albums from the 1970s received a similar treatment in 1998, being repackaged as a six-CD boxed set (entitled Donc) by the French label Fractal Records.

December 06, 2011, 5:02pm