When his score for Chariots of Fire won the Academy Award, Vangelis stayed home in Europe, partly from a fear of flying and mostly from disdain for the Hollywood machine. This episode traces the life of Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, the self-taught Greek composer who refused to learn to read music, treated the family piano as a physics experiment at age four, and walked away from rock stardom to build his own sonic laboratory.

The conversation follows him from the Forminx and Aphrodite’s Child, stranded in Paris during the May 1968 riots, to the 666 concept album, Nemo Studios in London, and the decision to turn down a spot in Yes. It explains how he performed as a one-man real-time orchestra using control-voltage routing before MIDI existed, why the Yamaha CS-80’s polyphonic aftertouch let his synthesizers breathe, and how synesthesia and the Pythagorean music of the spheres drove his later collaborations with NASA and the European Space Agency.

• Nails, pans, and a radio inside the piano: how a four-year-old learned to sculpt sound
• Faking sheet music for his teachers and bypassing Western theory entirely
• Why scoring a 1920s period film with pulsing synthesizers captured a runner’s heartbeat
• Blade Runner’s rain-soaked melancholy built from heavy reverb and detuned oscillators
• Juno to Jupiter, the Rosetta mission, and a Stephen Hawking tribute beamed toward a black hole