Vangelis - Beaubourg

Beaubourg is a studio album by Greek electronic musician Vangelis, originally released in July 1978 via RCA Records.

Vangelis is a Greek musician and composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, and orchestral music. He is best known for his Academy Award-winning score to Chariots of Fire (1981), as well as for composing scores to the films Blade Runner (1982), Missing (1982), Antarctica (1983), The Bounty (1984), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and Alexander (2004), and for the use of his music in the PBS documentary Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan.

Beaubourg is an expressionistic work, consisting almost exclusively of strange, unearthly sounds. Ring modulators, noise, and weird effects are unleashed in wide stereo spaces. The album is often referred to as anti-commercial, because of its non-melodic - even consonant - nature.

Vangelis however spoke with great affection about this piece in several interviews and his engineer says Vangelis took it very seriously while recording it.

"Beaubourg" takes its title from the street in Paris and with that also refers to the "Centre Pompidou" building in Paris, which functions as a centre for innovative modern (mainly abstract) arts.

The music on the album was primarily improvised on one or more Yamaha CS-80 synthesisers, and the ring modulator (which transforms simple tones into complex noises) was used as well.

This would be his final album with RCA Records, before signing a new contract with Polydor Records.

This album is a limited edition of 1,500 individually numbered copies on 180 gram audiophile aquamarine coloured vinyl with a printed inner sleeve, pressed in Europe via Music On Vinyl.