© 1999—2022
© 1999—2022
Nokalypse
Repeated in an Indefinitely Alternating
Series of Thoughts
LP (E73/A78)
Belgium £16.50 (including postage)
Europe £18.50 (including postage)
Rest of world £23 (including postage)
Edition of 250 copies
Co-published with absurd
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 this album — 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...
Reviews
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 pitch-shifted 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