condition (record/cover): NM / NM - Grey cover. Green labels. Persepolis on Philips documents the installation that Iannis Xenakis realized among the ruins of the ancient Persian capital in 1971, commissioned by the Shah to celebrate 2500 years of Empire. The political context was toxic: an authoritarian regime using culture as propaganda, Western intellectuals lending legitimacy to autocracy. Xenakis accepted nonetheless, convinced that art transcended its patrons.

The result is an electroacoustic polyptych of nearly unbearable violence: eight channels of sound projected among columns that Alexander the Great had spared, frequencies vibrating stones millennia old. There's no melody, no development in the traditional sense, only sonic masses that accumulate, explode, leave silence heavier than before.

The LP reduces eight channels to two, inevitable betrayal that Xenakis accepted as necessary evil. The domestic version cannot replicate the experience of standing among those ruins with sound attacking from every direction. But something passes through nonetheless: the Promethean ambition, the refusal of any human scale, the certainty that music can compete with architecture, with history, with time itself.