From: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Newsgroups: rec.music.misc
Subject: Top Ten? *What* Top Ten (more to come)
Date: 14 Dec 92 16:33:33 GMT
Reply-To: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Organization: Heurikon Corporation, Madison, WI

With the net's current favorite testosterone problem child Mr. Baggett's
spinnaker fully unfurled these days, it would seem that the signal to
noise is getting a little low. So I'll pitch in and do my bit to talk
about what's happened this year *and* simultaneously reinforce the keeno
new stereotype of the longtime rec.music.misc reader as someone who'll
listen to *anything*. In the interest of time, there will be 5 articles
on my top ten, three discs at a time.

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.

H. Gorecki "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" [Elektra Nonesuch] We start out
with a "classical" release that falls into a category that I flirt with
with some regularity (20th century classical music that's consonant
written while lots of other composers were doing the itchy and scratchy
stuff I tend to find more intriguing as a rule) but am rarely satisfied
with. A big orchestra, a soprano (Dawn Upshaw), and a composer whose work
I'd only heard before done live by the Kronos quartet at a gig in '88.
I basically ah...have some difficulty listening to the classically trained
female or male voice, preferring the clear and unvibratoed talents or a
Sandy Denny or Virginia Astley instead. The source material for the texts
are also a complete downer - bits of lamentation, letters to a parent 
scrawled by a faithful son on the wall of a place of incarceration; you
get the picture. But the results on this disc probably constitute one
of the most deeply moving experiences of listening to music that I've
had in a decade. It is absolutely beautiful in a way that erases all of
my prejudices about the source material - this huge top-down model in
brass and wood of the 19th century nation state that we call an orchestra
isn't at all ponderous, and Upshaw's voice takes all that technical stuff
that I normally hate and sends all those sad words soaring straight to
wherever I might imagine heaven to be. It's not a jolly evening's CD of
stuff, but to the extent to which art can be said to be transforming,
I think that this is one of that kind of disc.

P-Model "P-Model" Polydor Japan POCH-1128
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.

T-Bone Burnette "The Criminal Under My Own Hat" [Columbia] It's said that
some producers make better music for other people than they do for them-
selves (I've heard this said of Eno a bit recently since "Nerve Net", for
example). It would appear that the estimable Mr. Burnette gets around this
problem by releasing very short albums (by CD standards( very far apart.
Not as bad as the Blue Nile, but close. With the occasional exception
of forays into odd signal processing (such as found on his blistering
"Humans from Earth" which graces this dics and the soundtrack to Wim
Wenders' film "Until the End of the World"), this is very basic, no
frills acoustic music with a finely honed sense of irony, a cutting
moral edge to it (something that's sort of rare these days, with rage
being more in fashion), and some outstanding playing. The odd thing 
about this recording for me is that the acoustic instruments lend a 
kind of air of familiarity to the songs; they "feel" like effortless
performances of standards instead of new work without staring longingly
back at a fictitious day when G*d was in her heaven and the Grand Ol'
Opry was on every station. It's great to hear VanDyke Parks again,
honing the brittle core of "I Can Explain Everything" while T-Bone's
eerie falsetto keens over the top of it. As someone has said earlier of
Tom Waits' most recent work, this album seems to have married TBB's
talents for songwriting with the instrumentation in an effortless way.

More to come.
--
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
Newsgroups: rec.music.misc