Vangelis – The Tegos Tapes

vangelis-tegos-tapes-rare

One of the frustrations of fans of synthesist Vangelis is the huge volume of his soundtrack work that remains unreleased.

Blade Runner fans are still pining for a comprehensive soundtrack. The soundtracks to films like Missing, The Plague and The Bounty are only officially available in fragments.

And then there’s his soundtracks for Cavafy, FrancescoSplendeur Sauvage and many other films that have never been officially available.

The Tegos Tapes is an interesting example of these obscure Vangelis soundtracks.

The Tapes were created by surgeon Dr. Stergios Tegos, and contain educational examples of his microneurosurgery work. Tegos asked Vangelis to create a soundtrack for the videos and Vangelis agreed, composing over 10 hours of some of his more ambient music.

This music was lost to obscurity for years, because of the esoteric nature of the videos.

This changed when Vangelis Collector’s Don Fennimore came across a copy, while traveling in Greece, and wrote about it at his site.

Vangelis’s music for The Tegos Tapes will probably never get an official release, but Neville Dorrington, co-host of the long-running Australian ambient music radio show, Ultima Thule, has shared edits of the soundtrack via Soundclound for streaming listening.

You can listen to The Tegos Tapes via the embed below:

From The Tegos Tapes:

“Every human being, animal, plant or mineral carries the imprint of the cycle of Creation.

Sound has always followed the sequences of change in this cycle, like a code carrying the function and dimension of the universe, being at the same time its generator. Let us go deep into our memory (and remember), by doing this, we will be able to decode the code of the Creation of the universe and, therefore, our own.

What an extraordinary and divine key is music!”

Vangelis

16 thoughts on “Vangelis – The Tegos Tapes

  1. Oh man, I would do terrible, dirty, things to get a full rip of those videos. 12 hours of greek-language neurosurgery instruction, on VHS, scored by Vangelis. What an utterly fascinating artifact.

    Perhaps some day a less law-abiding individual will chance into a copy of these, but the odds of someone knowing what they are AND having the tools to digitize them AND having the willingness to put them up for piracy add up to being rather slim.

  2. Sadly, comments like this fuel the market for one-of-a-kind and rare audio sales, never heard outside the circles of collectors and a wealthy few.

    1. In this case, as one commenter already pointed out, the neurosurgeon who hired Vangelis has put copies of the videos online. But you’re not exactly mistaken either. Rare Boards of Canada (Catalog 3, Acid Memories, Hooper Bay), Godspeed You Black Emperor! (All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling), Jimmi Hendrix (Black Gold), Alan Parsons Project (The Sicilian Defence), and many others are allegedly sold for large amounts between collectors who protect their investments by keeping the recordings to themselves, or are bought by wealthy fans who want a piece of the musician’s music they can call their own. And considering how difficult it is for musicians to earn a living, I imagine this type of approach to album sale will become intentional among musicians (sell one copy of an album to your biggest fan for some serious cash, and they’ve got something that no one else will hear).

  3. how do you say exeretikous in english?..:):)oh yes,brilliant!!!:):):)
    From socrates drunk the conium ,up to today he made progress in music like no other musician during his time.

  4. So, finally did anyone take the trouble to download dr. Tegos’ files from Vimeo and erase the voices with some wonder plugin? I am listening to the edits posted by Nev Dorrington and Vcnbcn on SoundCloud and they are very good. Not complete, but very good!

  5. If Vangelis is going to release something that would be the music from the IAAF opening games in Athens in 1997, Qatar concert from 2012 and the Antigone concert from 2005!

  6. This is the music I extracted and remixed directly from the Micro-neurosurgery Videotapes of Dr. Stergios Tegos, a long time friend of Vangelis, that asked him two things: to obtain a magnetic resonance image of Vangelis brain and to compose music for his operations recorded in the videotapes. He satisfied only the second.
    It´s been suggested that this videos contain 12 hours of Vangelis music. I find this inaccurate, because the full length of them is 10 hours 18 minutes without taking away Dr. Tegos voice. Taking the voice out, and re-editing and remixing the music of the 35 cases so it could develop an atmosphere, leaves 8 hours 53minutes 57 seconds of Vangelis music. Enjoy…https://youtu.be/AUHA0nX-4nE

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *