Karlrecords — known for their releases of avant-garde and postmodern works by composers such as Steve Reich, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Lou Reed — has just announced the newest selection in their PERIHEL series. On July 15, the label will release Iannis Xenakis’s monumental 1977-78 electroacoustic composition La Légende d’Eer, a work that was thematically motivated by the composer’s interests in mythology and philosophy, most notably Plato’s myth of Er. The piece also reflected Xenakis’s growing experimentation with stochastic synthesis, a process of composition that arose after World War II in which aspects of composed music were determined by mathematical processes based on probability.
Previously existing releases of this work have been problematic, as some of them have included wrong sample rates and have been digitized backwards. As Karlrecords writes, this release “is a new version, using the 8-track-version that Xenakis himself presented at Darmstädter Ferienkurse in August 1978. As the automatic spatialization is lost, this became the only original version of this composition and is presented here…” The album was mixed down to stereo by Martin Wurmnest and was mastered and cut by Rashad Becker.
La Légende d’Eer will be available on 180 gram vinyl, which will include both a download code and liner notes by Reinhold Friedl, the curator of Karlrecords’s PERIHEL series.
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