interview with Soundtrack, a music and film website, Vangelis talked about his compositional processes. For films, Vangelis stated that he would begin composing a score for a feature as soon as he had seen a rough cut of the footage. In addition to working with synthesizers and other electronic instruments, Vangelis also worked with and conducted orchestras. For example, in the Oliver Stone film Alexander, Vangelis conducted an orchestra that consisted of various classical instruments including sitars, percussion, finger cymbals, harps, and duduks. While acknowledging that computers are "extremely helpful and amazing for a multitude of scientific areas", he described them as "insufficient and slow" for the immediate and spontaneous creation and, in terms of communication, "the worst thing that has happened for the performing musician". He considered that contemporary civilization is living in a cultural "dark age" of "musical pollution". He considered musical composing a science rather than an art, similar to Pythagoreanism. He had a mystical viewpoint on music as "one of the greatest forces in the universe", that the "music exists before we exist". His experience of music is a kind of synaesthesia. Instruments and equipment As a musician who always composed and played primarily on keyboards, Vangelis relied heavily on synthesizers and other electronic approaches to music, although his first instrument was the piano. He also played and used many acoustic and folk instruments when required ) and was a keen percussionist (in additional to a standard drum kit, he performed on vibraphone, timpani, symphonic gongs and snare drums, various gamelan instruments, a tubular bell, a wind gong, a bell tree and crotales). On several of his albums, he employed a live choir and classical soprano (usually Vana Veroutis). Vangelis' first electric keyboard was a Hammond B3 organ, while his first synthesizer was a Korg 700 monophonic. By his own admission, he never got rid of keyboards during the first two decades of his career, but accumulated new ones and simply stopped actively using the old ones once he had effective replacements or had exhausted their possibilities. By the mid-1970s, when based at his Nemo Studio in London, he was also using Elka Tornado IV Reed and Farfisa Syntorchestra organs, a Selmer Clavioline, a Hohner Clavinet D6, a Fender Rhodes 88 electric piano, a GR International Bandmaster Powerhouse 8-track drum machine, a Moog Satellite and various synthesizers by Roland (SH-1000, SH-2000 and SH-3A) and Korg (MaxiKorg