Philip Glass - Koyaanisqatsi

Philip Glass's extremely influential soundtrack for Godfrey Reggio's experimental documentary. A pivotal work in Glass's career as much as in American post-modernity, a musical equivalent to, say, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. It's also a fantastic record to listen to! Beautiful French copy.

Some pieces of work are so overwhelming iconic that I can't even think about listening to them again; they exist as a whole, in my mind, as false memories from my first encounter with them, sometimes as a teenager. In the case of Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi, My brain hosts a buffering 240p YouTube clip of buildings blowing up to the sound of Glass's most famous piece "Pruit Igoe".

By chance, I recently came across this copy of Koyaanisqatsi, and gave it a listen, years after my first encounter with Glass. I was flabbergasted, it was not at all the fortissimo soundtrack I remembered but an enveloping set of abstract choirs and nagging ternary synth and orchestral motives, which acme was indeed the famous housing projects' music.

My relationship with Glass's music has been complicated: as much as it was appealing to me as a teenager, offering a form of contemporary music I could only dream of - psychedelic, uplifting and fitting my postmodern fantasies - its grandiloquence and kitsch sometimes turned me off. I would not listen to Glass for years until I discovered his 1970's work; more rudimentary, and thus, more radical pieces - Music With Changing Parts and Music In Twelve Parts are two of the greatest pieces of classical music from the 1970's I can think of.

Very recently, I came to understand that what used to turn me off - kitsch and grandiloquence - were in fact indissociable with his grandest works, the kind that aimed for something universal, especially when his music operated as a soundtrack, making Glass one of the very few composers who tried to address the masses with a genuinely idiosyncratic music proposition (unlike Hans Zimmer, for instance, whose music is recycling die-hard clichés). Just like Laurie Anderson's albums, Philip Glass's soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi is a musically and historically essential piece of art because it offers a radically unique yet universally appealing alternative to the political/official narrative of the American Empire. A grandiloquent, world-famous masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless.  (VG+/VG+)

Tracklist

1. Koyaanisqatsi
2. Vessels
3. Cloudscape
4. Pruit Igoe
5. The Grid
6. Prophecies