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**Xenakis: Persepolis - A Monument to Sonic Architecture**

The Groupe De Recherches Musicales De La RTF dissolved into the digital ether decades ago, their mission accomplished and their revolutionary fervor absorbed into the broader fabric of contemporary composition. Yet their recordings remain like archaeological artifacts from a future that almost was – crystalline documents of an era when French radio technicians and avant-garde composers believed they could rewire human consciousness through carefully manipulated magnetic tape.

Their interpretation of Iannis Xenakis's "Persepolis" stands as perhaps their most enduring achievement, a work that feels less like music and more like witnessing the birth of synthetic civilizations. Originally commissioned for the 1971 Shiraz-Persepolis Festival in Iran, this piece emerged from Xenakis's obsession with ancient Persian architecture and his desire to create what he called "cosmic music" – compositions that would mirror the mathematical structures underlying both human monuments and stellar formations.

The album opens with the thunderous proclamation of "Persepolis," a 55-minute odyssey that unfolds like watching mountains grow in fast-forward. Xenakis, the architect-turned-composer who had worked alongside Le Corbusier, approached sound with the same geometric precision he once applied to concrete and steel. The GRM's realization of his vision transforms the studio into a vast resonating chamber where individual sounds behave like particles in some grand cosmological experiment.

What makes this recording particularly mesmerizing is how the GRM navigates Xenakis's notorious density. Where other interpretations can feel like sonic assault courses, their version reveals hidden chambers within the chaos. Around the 20-minute mark, when the piece reaches its first major climactic plateau, you can hear the individual tape machines breathing, creating micro-rhythms that pulse beneath the surface like underground rivers. It's here that the group's technical mastery becomes most apparent – they're not just playing back Xenakis's instructions, they're inhabiting them.

The genius of this particular realization lies in its spatial awareness. Xenakis conceived "Persepolis" for performance in the ruins of the ancient Persian capital, where audiences would be surrounded by 2,500 years of history while electronic sounds ricocheted off crumbling columns. The GRM captures this archaeological dimension through their mixing, creating phantom echoes that suggest vast architectural spaces even when heard through headphones. The piece becomes a sonic reconstruction of Persepolis itself – not as it was, but as it might have sounded in the dreams of its builders.

Stylistically, this sits at the intersection of musique concrète and what would later be called ambient music, though both terms feel inadequate. Xenakis was working with stochastic processes – mathematical models borrowed from probability theory – to generate musical structures that would mirror natural phenomena. The result sounds like listening to geological time compressed into human-scale duration, with tectonic shifts rendered as sweeping frequency modulations and erosion patterns translated into granular textures.

The supporting pieces on the album, including excerpts from Xenakis's "Hibiki Hana Ma" and "Bohor," serve as perfect satellites to the main work. "Bohor," in particular, with its foundation of Laotian mouth organ recordings processed through ring modulators and filters, demonstrates Xenakis's global perspective – his belief that electronic music could synthesize folk traditions from around the world into something genuinely universal.

Today, "Persepolis" reads like a prophecy of our current moment, when algorithmic composition and AI-generated music have become commonplace. Xenakis was essentially creating artificial intelligence through analog means, using mathematical formulas to generate musical structures that no human mind could have conceived through intuition alone. The GRM's interpretation captures both the inhuman precision of these processes and their strange emotional resonance.

This album remains essential listening for anyone interested in the intersection of technology and transcendence. It's music that demands to be played loud and in darkness, preferably while contemplating the rise and fall of civilizations. The GRM may be gone, but their "Persepolis" endures as a transmission from a parallel universe where French radio engineers successfully launched music into orbit around human consciousness. In our current age of infinite digital reproduction, there's something profoundly moving about these analog explorations of infinity – reminders that the future, once upon a time, sounded exactly like this.