From: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Newsgroups: rec.music.misc
Subject: Still *More* of the year's ah.........best (3 of 5)
Date: 14 Dec 92 23:48:00 GMT
Reply-To: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Organization: Heurikon Corporation, Madison, WI

Again, the denial: I think that top tens are useful only in terms of
the pointers they provide to work we may or may not have run across.
Those of you who've been here for any length of time should, I hope,
have something of a feel for the kind of thing that interests me, so the
usual caveats apply. I'm doing three discs per posting, and maybe even
cheating by doubling up. This is a series of postings of what I'd personally
consider some of the high points of the 1992 release year. They are not
ranked, and they are not sorted by genre; I don't do it as a radio guy,
so I don't do it here. 

John Harle "Saxophone - Nyman/Bryars/Westbrook" [Argo]
Choosing the Argo release I would list here was rough going. For me, one
of the interesting developments of the musical year involves the choice
on the part of the folks who run the Polygram Argo label to seriously
release a body of Minimalist-based work by younger British and American
composers. This current catalog now stretches over the period of 2 years
to a dozen or so uniformly excellent releases, from the 12-handed outfit
Piano Circus' three releases, to the Balanescu Quartet's releases of 
20th century string quartets by composers such as David Byrne, John 
Lurie, and Michael Nyman. This particular disc might help steer you
into these waters; three piece scored by three very different modern
British composers for saxophone and the Bournemouth Sinfonietta. As you
may know, the sax isn't particularly well known as a solo instrument for
small orchestral ensembles, so this is a pretty interesting project.
John Harle (a member of British composer Michael Nyman's band) gallops
at full throttle through "Where the Bee Dances" (some of the reworked
material from Nyman's music for the recent Peter Greenaway film "Prospero's
Books"), romps through a Mike Westbrook (yes, the same Mike Westbrook who
did those great arrangements of Wiliam Blake's lyrics for jazz ensemble)
piece chock full of the blues, and gracefully floats through Gavin Bryars'
"The Green Ray." The playing is really first rate, and its interesting 
to find this broad a range of Minimal and post-Minimal styles on one
disc. Harle's tone on the sax is amazing, and everything just "works"
for me. This is definitely one of those "modern music" discs for those
of you who're still living in a cave with the belief that all modern
"High Art" music is necessarily unlistenable and dissonant; it's a great
way to be proven wrong. 

Various Artists "Sahara Blue" [Crammed Discs/Made to Measure]
Those of us who have to do radio programming generally have a special
fondness for the idea of the compilation disc. After all, their shared
concept make 'em great for sequencing, and there are generally quite a
few things to choose from. But on another level, I rather like them as
a listener - it's fun to listen to various artist and working styles
collide and recombine. For those reasons, I've spoken admiringly in the
past year of the Japanese label Alfa's "In the 90s" series of remixes
in this light for the way that it brought together some of the major 
artists of 80s Japan with a pack of well-known American and European
remix people. I've also said a couple of nice things about the soundtrack
to Wim Wender's sprawling opus "Till the End of the World", which gives
us moody electronics from SPK's Graham Revell, U2, and K.D. Laing duetting
with Jane Siberry all in the same space. Others in our midst have spoken
admiringly of the recent Hal Wilner project in homage to Charles Mingus
"Wierd Nightmare." But my nonhierarchial listing for a compilation for
this year has got to be Hector Zazou and his friends' homage to the 
French poet Arthur Rimbaud "Sahara Blue". Everything on the disc is
either the direct text in French or English from Rimbaud's poetry, or
based in some way upon it. Like Wilner's work on the recent Mingus
tribute disc, Hector Zazou puts together a kind of "house band" on this
disc that lends a kind of aural consistency to the work. And what a 
guest list this is: Gerard Depardieu, Zazou on keys, Renaud Prion on winds, 
Ryuichi Sakamoto on piano, David Sylvian on guitars and vocals, John Cale's 
spoken word work, Richard Bohringer, Bill Laswell, Tim Simenon, Keith 
Leblanc, Susan Deihim, and Samy Birnbaum. And there's even an arrangement 
of some traditional Ethiopian material. And best of all (for me), I don't
hear the guest list. I hear the music.

Dome "1/2 & 3/4" [Mute/Grey Area] This should actually more or less wind
up as the "let's mention re-issues" item on the list. I can imagine
our net correspondent Al Crawford raising his eyebrows at this one; why
would I get hopped up about a re-release by two members of the seminal
punk band Wire putting out 4 albums which bear little if any relationship
to either the guitar-driven early Wire or the later Dada-fuelled electronics
that we associate with Wir? Perhaps it'll help to mention that this 
particular set of discs were in serious contention with a reissue of the
first recording by the British postpunk outfit This Heat; They're the
kind of thing that I really like reissues to be about; showing us again
the work of someone whose style and concerns have moved from the margins
toward the center. The Dome work unites a number of attitudes about making
sound and organizing it that bring together Situationalism along with 
what most of us would now recognize as "The Industrial Attitude." The
This Heat disc has that same kind of charge to it: a bunch of nearly
complete neophytes armed with a set of drums, some tape loops, and 
a lot of passion making dislocating and mysterious music. I think that
it's also fairly safe to point out that this stuff will probably not be
very pleasing either to those folks really familiar with early Wire,
although the Wir stuff does hint at what's here a bit. Finally, both
sets of recordins also have these eerie little islands of accessibility
in them (the Dome work with female vocalist A.C. Marias and This Heat's
song "The Fall of Saigon") which take on a completely different feeling
by being in the midst of the collection they're in. An additional nifty
point is that the Dome discs each collect *two* albums on one disc; I
recall Al Crawford being slightly more disposed to the 1/2 disc, while
I like 3/4 a bit better. I guess that this goes into the "knotty but
rewarding" pile along with Derek Bailey. My opinions on these other
discs may convince you to put them in the "throw this out immediately"
pile, however. Caveat Emptor.

--
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