From: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Newsgroups: rec.music.makers.synth,rec.music.synth,comp.music
Subject: A couple of year-end pointers
Date: 22 Dec 92 22:06:21 GMT
Reply-To: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Organization: Heurikon Corporation, Madison, WI

Well, posting number N straggled in from a cross-reader of rec.music.misc
and these newsgroups. They'd read this huge rambling 5-part posting I
do every year on the subject of discs that had passed across my desk
as a programmer of "Electronic/Experimental/Classical/Ethnic/Improvised
Conduct for the Discerning Listener Late in the 20th Century" which I
thought were deserving of wider exposure. This most recent reader asked
why I didn't post the reviews *outside* of r.m.m., since he thought that
the Carl Stone and Paul Lansky discs would be enthusiastically welcomed
by *any* rec.music.*.synth reader who never read *misc because "it was
too much work." I replied that, since the list was somewhat eclectic
in content, I'd inevitably get flamed bigtime for daring to mention 
works outside of the narrowcast parameters of the non-misc groups.
The response was quick: Edit the listing and post it there, stupid.
Folks should *hear* about these discs. So, properly chastened, I've
taken the list and excerpted the stuff that might be of interest to these
groups, appending the rest only as titles at the very end. I hope you'll
forgive the low-techy discourse; my intent was to pique the interest of
the rec.music.misc readers, whose style is somewhat different from what
one reads here. I have, I hope, erred on the side of enthusiasm.

_____begin excerpts______
Okay. So I don't actually believe in anything approaching a top ten. I
do, however, end the broadcasting year on my radio show by stringing 
together a number of discs appearing during the previous year which I
think are worthy of some serius consideration. And given that the territory
that I tend to traverse is probably of the *.misc variety, you'd wonder
how it'd be possible to make any judgements on someone free improvised
on an acoustic guitar (or do you say "...making random scratching noises?")
next to a CD of someone recycling mysterious bits of the world's popular
music in a way that radically transforms them anyway. This is, of course,
mine opine only. These things have lived on my player in peace and harmony
for quite some time, and I'm quite sure that I'll be spending a lot of
time with them in the year to come, as well. They are in no order of
rank.

Carl Stone "Mom's" [New Albion]
What do you call Carl Stone? He is a composer in that he really puts
a lot of work into structuring his compositions - in this sense, he kind
of fits into the Minimalist category's ability to draw worlds of difference
out of the tiniest perturbations. As a composer, he has a keen ear for
source material as the beginning point for his own compositions; one 
hears the polyphony of the Ituri Rain Forst, African pop, and the ghosts
of Balinese music. I suppose that those of you who enjoy Rap's ability to
create music by sampling from diverse sources and styles would also think
of what Carl does as the "ultimate" sampling. There is nothing in most
of his piece *but* samples - but the work isn't in your face, and insinuates
itself very quietly and calmly. His new disc on New Albion seem to me
to be his most focused and compelling collection of the odd kind of
"process" music that only he does. Unfortunately, it's a little difficult
to explain to folks who've never heard the stuff. Imagine this: you've 
got a recording of a Japanese woman singing Franz Schubert's "The
Linden Tree" in English, accompanied by only a piano. Rather than your
average classical voice, the singer's performing style has much more 
in common with the breathy, mannered delivery of someone like Kate
Bush. So you choose the most interesting sounding fragments of the song
and you put them in a loop, where each pass through the loop advances
a little further along in the performance, cutting just a tiny bit off
the beginning as you go. The piano becomes a box full of vibrating 
strings, and the little idiosyncracies of the singing become the 
"subject" of the song. All the while, the source stuff is still completely
recognizeable. *That's* the kind of stuff Carl does, and he does it
better than any other human on the planet. This disc also features a
marriage of some Pygmy singing and a single somber organ that lit the
phone lights like Christmas the first time I played it on my show (more
than one call like "I've never heard anything like that before. It's 
beautiful. Where do I buy it?" is usually a dead giveaway that this might
be cool stuff, insofar as I rely on my audience to provide a corrective
to my programming excesses), and some clattery stuff that probably
started its life as Afropop and no seems like Irish fiddle music played
by a salsa band. Really different, and *highly* recommended.

P-Model "P-Model" [Polydor Japan]
I know. I always list stuff that no one else can locate without the
secret decoder ring. So I feel stupid when one of my selections might
actually fall into this category. I can comfort myself with the thought
that Clayton will probably say something about Omoide Hatoba in *his* 
list, and even *I'm* having trouble finding it. Although I am not nearly
as learned and astute (despite my advanced age) as Al Crawford, I, too,
harbor a deep and abiding love for synthesizer-based popular music. 
Given the recent fashion in places like rec.music.synth or whatever it's
now called, I should think this would appeal to the retroid synth-pop
tendencies of nearly everyone: The Ultravox school of anthemic delivery
with the occasional "radio transmission" effect, breakneck tempos, lots
of little static and squiggly things, long whitenoise filter sweeps,
the ever popular filtered whitenoise percussion effect, and hardly a 
guitar in sight. This is the first album that P-Model released in maybe
6 years. Considering their earlier earlier and considerably more 
guitaristic punk roots, this album's abandonment of the samplers which
predominated on their last disc "Karkador" in favor of the dense and busy
surfaces (none of that Teutonic stripped-down simplicity here) comes not
so much as a canny commercial move as it does a clear and simple version
of some great music. This CD will be a delight to that lurking desire you
may have to hear some analog synthesizers again. Oh yeah - it's all sung
in Japanese, with the exception of little phrases (bungee jump, wire
self, 2d or not 2d) here and these. Bleep Bleep.

Paul Lansky "Homebrew" [Bridge Records]
Don't you tire even a *little* of the big themes, the grandiose algorithms,
and the gnawing sense that you often have to hunt pretty hard to find a
piece of computer music to play for your aunt Mathilda? What if all those
High Culture computer chops were turned to the task of making music whose
subversion was "sneaky"? Well, here it is: an entire album of computer
music made by a highly respected practitioner in the field [I'm not
sure how long ago, but I think I did a short review of Paul's earlier
disc on New Albion "Small Talk"] that you can actually like. Paul Lansky's
"Homebrew" is a collection of 5 pieces of NeXT-generated computer music
whose roots are solidly in the domain of the "real" world; no

squiggly little cryptohorns careening around what sounds like concert
halls at lunch-launching speeds or the sounds of the carcasses of
some immense and protesting animal being dragged across broken glass
in front of a marching band trained in Tibet here, nosirree. Lansky remains
solidly committed to making music that originates in the everyday world,
and his tools are used in a way which "finds" music rather than invents it.
"Table's Clear" is perhaps the easiest to describe. Paul took a recording
of his kids making noise with the stuff in their kitchen, added a few
little side episodes, fed it into the computer, and then sequenced and
retuned some of the sounds into this huge, cheery wall of Minimalist
tuned percussion. The repertoire involves rapping on countertops, glasses, 
frying pans, and those rude little farting noises made by forcing air 
through your hands that your parents always hollered at you about. It 
is both simple, humourous, and it manages to evoke a more foursquare 
balinese "kitchen gamelan" kind of ambiance. It's great digital fun.
The raw material of "Quakerbridge" takes a montage of shopping mall site
recordings and then feeds them through a bank of tuned filters which
trigger ghostly clouds of twinkly mandolins and choirs, while clearly
retaining the original source material (the soundtrack for Moses looking
across the Jordan River and seeing the Promised Land as a crowded Mall?)
In another piece, Hannah MacKay's wonderful homey bedtime story 
voice creates this peculiar little poststructural fairy tale
populated with nothing *but* time phrases and their implied resolution.
It isn't compelling because of her terrific Sprechstimme technique or
the great huge wads of high-powered processing Lansky brings to bear
on her voice (in fact, the whole of "Now and Then" is very unusual in
light of Lansky's other compositions precisely *for* its simplicity and
lack of all but the most subtle treatment) - it's the connection.
"Night Traffic" takes a simple premise - the sound of periodic evening
traffic processed by the computerin a way that adds a little "chordal" 
material...the passing truck flashes by in D-Minor, followed by another
couple of tonal masses with four wheels on the pavement. And the piece
ends with another use of the "filters excited using plucked string 
algorithms" techniques [even *mentioning* or trying to paraphrase the
method used to make this work makes me cringe. I'm thinking "Gack. No one
will want to listen to if unless I just stick to the way stuff *sounds.*"]
on the sound of clapping - producing a kind of hybrid of something like
Steve Reich's "Clapping Music" with a tuned percussion ensemble. Technology
with a human face - a smiling face.

The Orb "UFOrb" [Mercury/Big Life]
Everyone said, "But Greg - you love this boring and drony Eno nonsense.
Ambient House is just like that, but with drum machines. Besides, this
is just a case of using all the ideas about recording and mixing that you
avant-garde composer weenies love so much to do something completely 
different. You're just whingeing because you don't like the form it
takes." They were right, and being suitably chastened, I followed up
on the advice of Lazlo several years ago and picked up the KLF "Chill
Out" CD. Hmmmm. Not bad. Maybe a little heavy on the hokey "found" 
broadcasts and samples from Minny Ripperton, but the electronics here 
are pretty nice and it *did* manufacture this kind of virtual space
you could just enter and hang out in. So on the strength of that, I started
venturing a little more seriously into listening to house stuff that was
*not* quite so ambient. Well, the Orb's "Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld"
was, as Goldilocks would say, "just right." About as much beat as I was
comfortable with, some nice textures, and a decent groove." Their new
release, "UFOrb" is, to my fossilized brain, loads better: it's consider
ably more in the ambient vein, crosses into some of my favorite territories
(occasionally summoning the ghosts of  that Neue Deutsche Welle stuff
that I used to like before punk came along - kind of a Tangerine Dream
with a dollop of self-deprecating humour. Even some pretty tasty dub!)
for long term "low volume" listening, and it's divinely well sequenced.
If there are ways of taking the "Music as the soundtrack of your life"
twaddle that FM stations sell as a way to homogenize stuff to flow into
the commercials and to subvert the notion by using the stuff *as*
environment, then this disc has been humming away in the office at least
as much as Eno's "Shutov Assembly" - or maybe more (and you *know* how
I feel about the domed one). On the radio in its unnanounced form, it
actually fades out of Lamonte Young and into heaven knows what, snagging
the Deadhead and the academic electronic music weenies alike. Finally,
the domestic American release of this disc (the early editions, anyhow)
is a terrific bargain, in that it includes a whole bonus disc with the
full 40-minute "Blue Room" UK single *and* a couple of remake/remodel
versions *and* their latest single "Assassin" in the bargain.

SPK - "Zamia Lehmanni (Songs of Byzantine Flowers)" [Mute/Grey Area]
Another disc from the Mute/Grey Area series of releases that gave us
the Dome albums, but one of quite a different sort. 
One of the generally interesting features of our tendency to group
work in terms of "genre" for me involves the choices that artists
make as they simultaneously push against the boundaries at the same
time as their work moves from the territory of the edge to the center.
Perhaps the problem is one of emotional limitation, or maybe we're 
thinking of a personal rejection. Nonetheless, I tend to find a similar
urge on the part of artists on a regular basis - "I'm comfortable with
the form, *now* what?" The question of how one decides to proceed 
goes from *that* point is, for all intents and purposes, the same kind
of question that faces someone who plays the blues or jazz players like
Anthony Davis: "Do I redefine my work by including something else, by
actually changing what I do, or is it possible that I can identify 
similar patterns in other kind of work and marry them to my own?"
For Graham Revell of SPK, the answer to that question led him away from
more orthodox industrial work of the early SPK albums into a brief flirtation
with more electronic dance work with a female singer, and finally to his
current work as a soundtrack composer ("Dead Calm" and some of the music
for "Till the End of the World"). 

The earlier work of SPK's that seen release is much more solidly in the
"pounding and screaming" genre of industrial labor honed to a fine
and taxonomically easy to identify polish by bands like Test Dept.,
Esplendor Geometrico, and Crash Worship. This rerelease really marks the 
beginning of his plunge into his later work as a "composer"; it borrows his 
singer Sinan (sounding *very* different) and the usual metallic 
suspects and runs the whole thing into a Fairlight for some judicious
sampling in the bargain. The finished work combines the spare and somber 
sound of ambient industrial work with a set of similar urges found in 
ritual or liturgical acoustic musics in a way that, though a little 
emotionally chilly, is coherent and fully realized. Even though it's a
reissue, I don't think that there's any work quite in its genre or this
quality (and I think that the more industrial SPK works may have been
bettered by some of the newer industrial bands. This is only opinion,
mind you).


The other discs covered in the articles were (again, in NO order of rank):
Probably, no reviews of them belong here....


Derek Bailey "Guitar Solos Volume II" [Incus]
Arrested Development - "3 ..in the life of" [Chrysalis or Charisma]
H. Gorecki "Symphony #3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs)" [Elektra Nonesuch] 
T-Bone Burnette "The Criminal Under My Own Hat" [Columbia] 
John Harle "Saxophone - Nyman/Bryars/Westbrook" [Argo]
Various Artists "Sahara Blue" [Crammed Discs/Made to Measure]
Dome "1/2 and 3/4" [Mute/Grey Area]
Arvo Part "Miserere" [ECM]
Bill Nelson "Blue Moons and Laughing Guitars" [Caroline]

--
The law moves quickly in the rain/and chokes the world with memorials./The
courts accept the lowest superstition/into evidence. And we embrace quickly in
the rain,/conceiving a hale infant with hands to wrinkle/the bedsheets toward
it, wave by trough by wave./Gregory Taylor/Heurikon /Madison, WI/608-828-3385