Nokalypse
Repeated in an Indefinitely Alternating
Series of Thoughts
LP (E73/A78)

Nokalypse is Themistoklis Pantelopoulos (1982). Based in Athens,
Greece, he has been making electronic music for the best part of
a decade. Initially producing beat-driven and ambient work (as a
solo artist and as a member of several bands), he abandoned
rhythm and melody in 2006 following a prolonged and deepening
exposure to various experimental, improvised and classical musics.
Pantelopoulos also established his label, Triple Bath, that year.

The two compositions that make up Repeated in an Indefinitely
Alternating Series of Thoughts (Discerning Eye of Mystics and
Everlasting Babylon of Your Mind) are extracted from a vast
body of work created during the Spring and Summer months
of 2006. According to Pantelopoulos, the objective of this
recording session was to see if he could ‘thrill himself’ without
the use of any melodic elements, at a time when he was seeking
non-emotional or gnostic stimulation; sound itself was to be the
sole, fundamental component.

Revisited in 2009, the tracks were mixed and processed further,
resulting in Nokalypse’s most lavish electroacoustic work to date:
toxic, metallic, alienated sound, far away from academic theories
or political beliefs...

First edition of 250 copies. Co-published with absurd






solely Everlasting Babylon of your Mind, the A side to this
release, is a complex knot of horrible electronic sounds,
which rotate and mutate inside an undefined framework
and never resolve into anything remotely listenable or take
shape in any way. Indeed as the piece progresses, or at
any rate your needle moves closer to the centre of the
LP, the complexity simply grows and becomes even more
impenetrable, producing a thicket of aural thorns and barbs.
Detuned synths, off-key notes, jangling shards, queasy
drones and more are all bundled together into this atonal
ball of disease-ridden nastiness. Lacking the structural
capability of Xenakis, this has plenty of complex events
and layers, but Pantelopoulos doesn’t have a clear idea
of how he’s going to organise all that complexity, other
than just allowing this small army of carnivorous insects
to march where they will over the bumpy terrain. A tough
listen. The B side, Discerning Eye of Mystics, is slightly
more conventional science-fiction dark ambient droning.
There are faint mechanical clanks in the background add-
ing a tone of menace. With its clusters of dark continuous
sound, this side is more in the vein of [Iancu] Dumitrescu’s
music, and indeed is rather akin to moments of Pierres
Sacrées in the way it makes identical use of heart-stopping
crashes of metallic noise to punctuate the droning stillness.
I found this a shade more listenable than the flip, but its
overall vagueness and lack of ideas made me want to re-
visit the horrors of the A side again. Which is a bit like
preferring a bout of indigestion to eating another bowl of
porridge. The quasi-metaphysical titles don’t help either,
giving me as much mental indigestion as the music itself,
but there's no denying the seriousness of this man’s
intentions and the patience he has expended in realising
them.

Ed Pinsent in The Sound Projector
—

Themistoklis Pantelopoulos insists that this work is an
attempt to dispense with melody and instead focus solely
on sound itself, in the manner of the electroacoustic music
that has become his main inspiration. Nevertheless, his
roots in less academic forms like Industrial and Ambient
are immediately apparent — this is primarily a sensuous
rather than an intellectual experience, comprising dense
organ tones pitchshifted until they acquire a ringing,
metallic edge. In the end, contrary to what Nokalypse
might hope, the material here is all about melody, and
on that basis the album is a qualified success.

Keith Moliné in The Wire
—

[A] comparison in a surface sense to Xenakis is hard to
pass up. The Xenakis of Kraanerg and Persepolis, at least
as evidenced here. The piece is a huge mass of swirling
sounds, kind of organ-like in essential nature but I get the
feeling they’re often synthesised mutations from a large
variety of sources, some of which might be natural.
They’re layered one atop the other, several dozen ply thick
it seems, into a huge, messy lasagna of sound. It’s not
bad at all, actually, if (not surprisingly) lacking Xenakis’
structural rigour and having, somewhere beneath it all,
a rockish tinge (no rhythms, just a kind of guitar-chordy
sound).

Brian Olewnick at Just outside