Invisible Connections is one of Vangelis’s least-discussed and least-heard major-label releases, and it has the feeling of an anomaly written all over it. For one, it was released on Deutsche Grammophon—the inviolable classical-music label with some of the best recordings in its class anywhere, but not generally known for releasing artists like Vangelis in any measure. This was and is their only Vangelis disc, which made me wonder if there had been an abortive attempt to sign him to the label as a regular recording artist, and it had been scotched when the resulting record came out and stumped even many a longtime Vangelis fan.

I was myself one of those fans when I blundered across Connections airing on the experimental / free-form Jersey-area college station WFMU. I tuned in during the clattering, atonal first part of the title track, and when the ominous synthesizer drones began that marked the start of the second half of the track, I somehow knew this was Vangelis: Nobody else played like that; nobody else used those same chords or progressions, no matter how alien the instrument itself. The record was aggravatingly difficult to find—this was pre-Internet, pre-Amazon—and even many of the music-shop owners I talked to didn’t know a thing about it. Finally, I blundered into it again—in a New York City street vendor’s carrel, for a mere $8—and on listening to it without the noise and sputter of the radio I found myself loving it all the more.

Connections, which consists of three long tracks, sounds like a set of tapes from the same sessions that were used to create the Blade Runner score, although it doesn’t share much in common with that film’s sweeping, majestic music. It’s more reserved and unmelodic, turned inwards rather than outwards, and the first half of the opening 10+-minute cut is little more than dissonant percussive clatter processed through a battery of studio effects. And then those grand and ominous keyboards of his come in, and for me the second half of that opening track is among the very best things Vangelis has recorded. It doesn’t sound dated at all, electronic or not (and there’s plenty of electronically-fueled music that now sounds hopelessly backwards, trust me); like his other great productions, it has the feel of something lifted outside of time by sheer force of will.

It’s a shame the rest of the album isn’t like that. “Atom Blaster” and “Thermo Vision” sound like more or less the same thing separated into two arbitrary halves; they’re made up of pointillist little blobs of sound, padded with long silences and heavy reverberations. Vangelis possessed one of the largest spring-reverb units in the world—that plus a taiko drum was how he created that legendary reverberating boom that opens Blade Runner—and uses similar echo effects to bathe everything in a sea of spacey distances. But apart from their deep atmosphere they’re just not very interesting musically. They make for great background filler, but the minute you pay attention you realize there’s nothing there except a background, like it was part of a more interesting recording where the more prominent parts of the mix were inexplicably dropped.

Here’s the paradox. When it comes to the whole of Vangelis’s recorded output, I think I’ve played Invisible Connections for my own pleasure more often than anything else. That doesn’t mean I think it’s one of his better recordings, though: someone just starting out with his music is probably better off with a film score or a “conventional” album like Earth or The City. Then you can come back to Connections and decide if it’s really one of his best works or just the bizarre one-off indulgence many people dismissed it as.