Vangelis Essentials

Greek composer Vangelis Papathanassíou began as a progressive rock keyboardist with the band Aphrodite's Child and nearly joined Yes in 1974. (He later made duo albums with Yes singer Jon Anderson as Jon & Vangelis.) But it was his soundtracks, especially 1981's Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire and 1982's Blade Runner, that won him a broader audience. Both evinced the sweeping orchestral style that became his trademark but also opened up new worlds for electronic synthesis within film scores. In the decades to follow, Vangelis’ influence would be felt all across the electronic music landscape. His ambient work informed techno's and dubstep's progressively inward-looking direction, and he provided a blueprint for modern experimental producers such as Oneohtrix Point Never and trance artists like Armin van Buuren to recontextualize the sounds of New Age in their own ways. He continued to make beautiful, challenging music well into his seventies, including 2021’s Juno to Jupiter, an album inspired by NASA’s Juno space probe. Vangelis died in May 2022 at the age of 79.