Vangelis – Mask

A very powerful album.Pity about the cover though.One of the cheapest looking covers I have ever seen.Almost as bad as those terrible Elvis albums from the 70`s!

This is one of my favorite Vangelis albums, and is way underrated. The pressing sounds fantastic too even if the disc is pretty flimsy. Writing this about a week after he passed - RIP.

Overall satisfying, beautiful melodies combined with high quality sounds, classic themes that would fit well as a movie soundtrack.

This IS Heaven & Hell part deux! Seriously a return to Vangelis's powerful triumphant and dynamic sound utilizing that ....famous Yamaha synth and early digital synthesizer re-pleat with a choir(that doesnt seem to get any credit in the cd I have!). The music here is not something you sit back and relax to more like an adventure for the inner ear. Has not aged one bit like alot of Mr. V's music.

The photo do not look like a Polydor cover...
The photo is about the Eurostar release!

The most powerful music (and Vangelis album) I've ever heard, the deep synth lines from his CS-80 combined with the background singers voices make for a mind blowing ear experience, put on your best headphones and listen from start to finish.

A tragically unknown and underrated work.

It is something of a cross between electronic music and plainchant; it sometimes borders on opera, albeit ruthlessly and unabashedly modernist, but without the distraction of an overt narrative. The music has a distinctive, palpable texture--buzzing electrodes, bright percussion and rich voices--within a spacious, captivating ambience.

More deliberate and structured than his film scores and less abstract than "Beaubourg" or "Invisible Connections", behind "Mask" is some wonderful music.

As near to a style of electronic opera as one can imagine. While the tonality is firmly rooted in western modes, Vangelis manages a level of timbral and textural depth that is striking, furious and beautiful. After his Beaubourg series, this is likely one of his darkest works (though more accessible).

This album might indeed be his analog electronic music swan song, for none of his subsequent works in the years since has employed his trademark analog sound to the same effect; like so many of his contemporaries, he was all too quickly infatuated with the meaningless bric-a-brac and sonic mimicry of the digital sampling age.

For aficionados of the analog electronic sound, I can't recommend this highly enough.