Sensational archival release!! This is the first official digital release of Anestis Logothetis, who has to be considered one of the most prominent figures in electronic music and graphic musical notation. This fantastic CD contains the 'legendary' Fantasmata, that is the first tonal composition created in Austria, realized in 1960 at the, back then, newly established Institute of Electroacoustic Music at the Vienna Academy of Music and the Performing Arts with the assistance of recording director Hellmut Gottwald.
Fantasmata is a key word in the parlance of Western philosophy. Aristotle describes “fantasmata” as images that have their origin in the reminiscence of what has been perceived, and are created through the experience of the sensual perception of individual objects and occurrences. Logothetis thereby meets the core theme of electroacoustic music. Several years later, François Bayle describes acousmatic music as a music of fictional spaces and phantom figures – a world between real and imaginary causes. As sound material, Logothetis uses ecstatically shouting voices from Congo dances and several concretely recorded sounds. With the technical means of the 1960s (tempo variation, ring modulation) a work with a high inner tempo emerges, in which the listeners become groping characters in an unknown sound universe. This river of known and unknown sounds flows into a sounding stream, that of Meditation – a raw, granularly circling soundscape that opens up an archaic world of tonal being.
while Fantasmata remains Logothetis’ only work without visual realization, there is a “score” to Meditation, an action symbol which shows the circling on a drum covered with a skin. Logothetis carried out this work on his own, and it was performed in 1963 at Hermann Nitsch’s first public action (Aktion Perinetgasse – The Blood Organ”) of Viennese Actionism in Galerie Lagergasse.

Wellenformen (Wave Forms): Logothetis pursued a completely different work approach in his opus Wellenformen. In Winter 1980/1981, he was invited to the Elektronmusikstudion Stiftelsen, EMS Stockholm. IMPAC, a graphic program allowing movements started with a joystick to be followed for several seconds, was developed there by Michael Hinton. Logothetis assigned different parameters to the received results for sound creation. These results were then mounted over each other in layers. The tonal possibilities of this program were limited, but the movement possibilities were enormous. This must have been inspiring for Logothetis to be able to tonally transpose his aleatoric compositional approach and his knowledge about cybernetics with a computer program. The interwoven waves in a stream of synthetic sounds are audible. In other places, Logothetis labels the parameters of his compositions: the multilayeredness of the tonality and the multilayeredness of time, movement, speed, flow and sound density, as well as the dynamization of music.

Untitled, Coloured Noise. The audio tape archive contains approx. 250 tapes. Logothetis’ constant companion at his concerts was the audio tape recorder. In addition to the acoustic documentation of the performances of his works and speeches, he also collected the most diverse sounds for further processing. Tapes 99, 124, 125, 143, 153, 193, 226 and 231 are material tapes. Among them, the study Farbiges Rauschen is to be found. The time frame of the recordings is indicated as between 1962-67. In a calm which is unusual for Logothetis, the filtered noise sounds flow by and open up an expansive space to listen to the individual sound occurrences and to imagine their possibilities.

Nekrologlog: This brief audio play of approx. 10 minutes was created in 1961 and was added as the closing address of my audio play Mantratellurium in 1970 – as its linguistic structures complemented those of Mantratellurium – but, as an independent monologue, was first performed on January 30, 1974 in my Planetarium Concert for the musical youth.