Dr. Stergios Tegos & Vangelis -Microneurosurgery Soundtrack, you can listen to it here.
As we learn from various sources in the net (and most notably emportal.info):
Around a year ago, Christmas last year, a Vangelis collector Don Fenimore (uncledon) confirmed the existence of a medical book & 3 x 3.5 hours video tapes with ~ 11 hours of Vangelis music. The mysterious project was listed some time ago on the EMI websites simply as Tegos Case 1-35, no other info.
Preamble
Dr. Stergios Tegos video recorded 35 Microneurosurgery procedures between '91-'98 for a medical book. The videos were totally silent with no medical instruments noises or any other sound effects, no surrounding environment, just close ups of the surgery areas. So he asked Vangelis to compose some background music which he did, almost 12 hours worth. The Box/book/tapes package was released in 1998 and sold through specialized Medical outlets & like on Silent Portraits, Vangelis is not credited on the cover keeping his contribution undetected.
The print is on high quality paper and two column format Greek/English.
Goodies
The Video tapes are in PAL format with very good Stereo audio, image quality is also excellent for a tape although not something for most of us to watch...Each "Case" ranges from 10-28 minutes with it's own unique soundtrack, Dr. Tegos does explain in Greek something about what he does in 20-50 seconds bursts, the rest is clean music. Since the tracks are so long it's quite feasible to extract a lot of meaningful audio by deleting the commentaries/crossfading or backfilling the gaps with cloned sections resulting in ~ 8 hours of music.
The music came as an unbelievable surprise, this is Vangelis like we never heard before, very long tracks, all slow matching the surgery video with occasional distant percussion, and, hours of it.
The sounds seem to come from all of his releases excluding the RCA years, from L'apocalypse des animaux right through Invisible Connections, Voices, The City, less the bombastic sounds.
All compositions are atmospheric ranging from Steve Roach cosmic to ambient, to slow classical to Invisible connections sparseness filled with sounds from The City, yet there is not a single minute sounding like anything he released on record. At long last, I think this is Vangelis in his experimental (yet polished) form, maybe this is how he composes- long pieces and what we get to hear are polished extracts with melodies on top...As usual with Vangelis, we find more about him from those around him, see the acknowledgement section..
Now you can listen to a large portion of that music here.
