condition (record/cover): NM / EX - Insert included. The La Voce Del Padrone LP gathering ST/10-1,080262, Polla Ta Dhina, Akrata, and Achorripsis shows Iannis Xenakis in full stochastic mode, the composer as mathematician wielding probability theory like a blowtorch. These pieces from the late 1950s and 1960s represent his most systematic assault on traditional composition, works generated through calculations that would later require computers but were initially performed by hand, Xenakis hunched over graph paper for months at a time.

Achorripsis (1956-57) applies Poisson distributions to orchestral textures, scattering sonic events across time and instrumental space according to statistical laws. The result sounds nothing like mathematics and everything like natural catastrophe: clouds forming and dissolving, crowds gathering and dispersing. Polla Ta Dhina, a choral setting of Sophocles, proves Xenakis could harness these techniques to ancient text, the stochastic processes somehow amplifying rather than obscuring Greek tragedy's terrible weight.

The influence radiates outward: Brian Ferneyhough's new complexity, Helmut Lachenmann's musique concrète instrumentale, even certain strains of extreme metal all owe debts to Xenakis's fundamental insight that music could be organized by laws other than melody and harmony. This LP collects the evidence.