[Thor Joachim Haga]

I’ve always been terrible at remembering ‘firsts’, as it all flows together organically in my mind. When I did the 3-hour Vangelis podcast with a couple of colleagues 6 years ago (in Norwegian, so no value to you), I actually had to change my origin story midway. At first I thought it was BLADE RUNNER that got me into his work, but as it turned out, it wasn’t.

I was probably aware of the CHARIOTS OF FIRE theme as a child in the 80s, without knowing its origin.

But the story really begins in the late 80s, maybe the early 90s. I was with my family at our summer house in Denmark. I often hung out with the next door neighbor’s kid. He had a few cassettes in the series “Synthesizer’s Greatest Hits”. A great series of albums by the Dutch synth wizard Ed Starink, who managed to do cover versions very close to the originals while adding his own twist to things.

At this time, I was already into Jean Michel Jarre and electronic music, so I was always on the lookout for more recommendations within the idiom. I made a mixed tape from those albums, and one of tracks I selected was “Dervish D” by Vangelis – originally a blues-infused track from SPIRAL, but without a backbeat. Starink added that backbeat, which – to this day – I consider a superior version to Vangelis’ original.

And so Vangelis entered my radar. For years thereafter, he was sort of in the outer limits of my consciousness, even when “Conquest of Paradise” was played constantly on radio in the early 90s. I liked his music, but it was a bit too abstract and slow for my teenage impatience. Certainly too much to properly investigate.

But then in the mid 2000s, my taste changed into calmer, more ethereal landscapes. And so I delved into Vangelis. It reached its zenith in 2020, when I did the Vangelis podcast, but was then boosted even more when he died just 1.5 years later. So he’s now easily my third place, after Williams and Zimmer.

BLADE RUNNER remains enormously important to me. It was the subject of one of my analysis chapters (in my thesis). Still my favourite, bar none. But following that: L’APOCALYPSE DES ANIMAUX, OCEANIC, 1492 and VOICES. I’ve heard 90% of what he’s done, but as there is so much left that is unreleased, I have a lifetime of exploration still.