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6. Philip Glass – Akhnaten (1987)
800,000 people visited the British Museum in 1972 to see the gold death mask of 18th Dynasty ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun. I was not one of them, being 3 years old, but I believe my parents went. Certainly they had a fabric print of the mask hanging above the toilet in our semi detached home in St Albans.
That print had a profound and enduring effect on me. This mainly manifested itself in a recurring nightmare in which my friends and I were chased around a graveyard and similar locations by a floating version of the death mask, emitting a sinister green gas. Gradually my friends would disappear until I was the only one being chased. And then I would wake up. It's a dream I still have occasionally now when stressed or ill.
There are lines from Egyptology to Sun Ra and afro-futurism - and also to Aleister Crowley's victorian enthusiasm for exotica. But those are for another time.
On Sunday January 18 1987 an edition of London Weekend Television's The Southbank Show aired on Philip Glass. I vaguely recall this being about minimalist music generally and also featuring dire new age nonsense from the Windham Hill label, which I hated. I was gripped by the Philip Glass stuff though. I'd probably read about him in the NME and Bergman and Horn's
Experimental Pop: Frontiers of the Rock Era which I had got out of the library because it had Laurie Anderson on the cover and included a photo of Einsturzende Neubauten looking deranged whilst burning something. I was transfixed by the Glass section of the show and the commentary about minimalism and what it did. My parents walked past the living room and nagged me about sitting too close to the screen. We didn't have a VCR so that was it - focus intently on the moment or lose it forever.
I later discovered that my Dad has a cassette boxset of Glass' Einstein on the Beach, so I would play that on his fancy stereo when everyone was out. It was too long, but I liked the repetition, the riffs, the spoken word interludes. I found the overlap with the New York experimental art punk scene incredibly exciting. And later on the resonances with techno and ambient.
In recent years my Dad and I have been to a few gigs together including a few performances of Philip Glass material. We were due to see the man himself at the Barbican last week but Phil was ill. The Philip Glass Ensemble still did us proud though.
Akhnaten is about a Pharaoh who isn't Tutankhamun, but close enough. It has a bunch of readings from the Egyptian
Book of The Dead and is cosmically massive in the way that you would want a 14 part 3 hour long Philip Glass opera about ancient Egypt to be.