"Kindermusik: Improvised music by babies"

On paper this album is a great idea. Give some babies toys, instruments or whatever and record the results. Unfortunately Kindermusik amounts to nothing but uninteresting tracks that are essentially field recordings of playrooms. Nursery With Wound it isn’t.

Amorfon

What should be achieved by such a project is a record of improvisations of a greater creative purity than an adult. These children should be significantly less influenced by previous musicians as an older performer as they are newcomers to the realm of music, they don’t know Britney Spears from Stockhausen. The lack of fine motor skills should also lead to interesting outcomes as it adds to the randomness of the situation. That’s what should be but Kindermusik never gets off the ground (I guess you can say it’s got teething problems).

I was quite intrigued before I listened to the album as the sleeve was fantastic. A list of the performers was on the back, their names, photos of them and their instruments. In addition to the expected items such as voice and toys there some more outlandish devices like organ and zitar. After listening to the album I decided that the sleeve was the highlight of this release. The pieces are exactly like photos of babies, largely boring for everyone apart from those who know the baby in question or their parents. This is like some stranger coming up to you and opening up his wallet to show you a picture of his kid except replace “wallet” with “mp3 player” and “picture” with “piece of music.” It’s not that the recordings are awful, they’re better than a lot of improvised performances I’ve seen. There’s just nothing here to relate to or get into.

Kindermusik can be intellectualised until the cows come home (as the compiler Yoshio Machida has done by including a John Cage quote and words like “betweenness” in the liner notes). Is it really improvised music as do the children intend to make music? Or does that make it true improvised music? Or are they actually trying to play something and just can’t? At the end of the day it doesn’t matter because most of it is unremarkable. The only thing of any real note is Hinata Miyazaki’s piece which sees him play a teething ring hooked up to a sampler. The sound of his chewing and sucking is translated into xylophone notes. That’s very little to do with the baby’s performance and more the ingenuity of whoever designed the teething ring. The rest of the tracks are just children gurgling and mashing the buttons on electronic toys. Benjamin Deutsch and Goh Yokota’s efforts are both prime examples of this. It’s impossible to dress this up as anything more than self indulgence by the parents. Bill Hicks said it best: “Your children aren’t special.”

samples:

• Moyona Sonobe - Steel Pan
• Goh Yokota - Toy
• Hinata Miyazaki - Teething ring sound instrument