This week's series of episodes features images from Asheville, NC, which was devastated by Hurricane Helene this past week.
Please consider donating to the various organizations in and around the area.
Episode 714 features music by Pan•American, Maria Somerville, Patrick Cowley, The Gaslamp Killer and Jason Wool, Der Stil, Astrid Sonne, Reymour, Carlos Haayen Y Su Piano Candeloso, Harry Beckett, Tarwater, Mermaid Chunky, and Three Quarter Skies.
Episode 715 has Liquid Liquid, Kim Deal, Severed Heads, Los Agentes Secretos, mHz, Troller, Mark Templeton, Onkonomiyaki Labs, Deadly Headley, Windy and Carl, Sunroof, and claire rousay.
Episode 716 includes Actors, MJ Guider, The Advisory Circle, The Bug, Alessandro Cortini, The Legendary Pink Dots, Chihei Hatakeyama and Shun Ishiwaka, Arborra, Ceremony, Ueno Takashi, Organi, and Saagara.
This Italian synth visionary made quite a spectacular impression with 2017's Patterns of Consciousness and now makes her Editions Mego debut with its proper follow-up. To some degree, Barbieri picks up exactly where she left off, as Ecstatic Computation shares its predecessor's masterfully executed conceptual conceit: using subtle shifts in obsessively repeating patterns to achieve a trancelike and hallucinatory effect. Given both that objective and Barbieri's singular compositional rigor, Ecstatic Computation bears little resemblance at all to the work of other synth artists, but it also sounds quite different from the sprawling and sometimes overwhelming Patterns of Consciousness as well. While it is hard to pick a favorite between the two albums, this one is definitely the more accessible, as Barbieri has distilled her vision into a much more concise and focused presentation. This album is also quite a bit more varied and unpredictable, as Barbieri occasionally allows the machine-like precision of these pieces to careen off the rails and unleash a glorious and vivid shower of sparks.
Anyone in search of one single piece that perfectly captures all that is unique and wonderful about Barbieri's vision would be well-served by heading straight for Ecstatic Computation's opening stunner "Fantas."The piece begins by slowly billowing up through a static-ravaged fog streaked with howling, corroded snatches of melody, then coheres into a propulsively tight, dense, and pulsing arpeggio theme.It is an eerily beautifully and tense motif on a purely musical level, yet I am still more stuck by how sleek and futuristic it all sounds.Curiously, however, that central theme dissolves around the halfway point to reveal a disorientingly blurred and woozy interlude that sounds like out-of-phase tape loops of an organ mass.Initially, Barbieri's choice to derail that impressive initial momentum seems like a quite a perplexing one, but the original theme slowly fades back into focus to ride out the piece's final minutes…except that it is not quite as straightforward as that.Instead of fading away or just ending, the central theme is instead deconstructed, slowed, and stretched until it is destroyed in a visceral flurry of eruptions that feels like a dangerously close fireworks display.From start to finish, "Fantas" is a tour de force performance that vividly illustrates where Barbieri is at this stage of her career.Most other synth artists are content with coming up with a killer patch and shaping it into a composition–with Barbieri, that seems like it is merely the starting point.It is very easy to picture her room strewn with obsessive diagrams, notes, and drawings as she wrestles to find a way to transform each new piece into something mesmerizing and surprising rather than merely good.
Following the virtuosic latticework of that initial statement of intent, Barbieri allows herself to get a bit loose and experimental for next few pieces.While "Spine of Desire" is merely a brief and pleasant interlude, "Closest Approach to Your Orbit" is yet another intricate pattern of subtly shifting and transforming arpeggios.For the most part, it is a more understated work than "Fantas," which enables the tumbling and occasionally squirming patterns to be a bit more hypnotic as there is no prominent melodic figure to steal the focus.There are some unusual dynamic and textural curveballs to be found as well, as the piece opens sounding vaguely like a marimba and closes sounding like a harpsichord, while everything in between is characteristically burbling and futuristic.Aside from that, there is yet another climactic eruption of reverberating fireworks.The following "Arrows of Time," on the other hand, is quite a radical detour, as Barbieri replaces her synth with a ghostly layered chorale of her own vocals over some sparse chords.It is quite a lovely piece and one that is far outside Barbieri's usual approach, yet it still feels strange and haunting enough that it would not seem out of place in a space-themed Kubrick or Tarkovsky film.The album is rounded out by two final pieces that return to the rough template of "Fantas" with some ingenious and distinctive twists.The better of the two is the twinkling and majestic "Pinnacles of You," which becomes increasingly frayed and disorienting as notes begin to sizzle and unpredictably lag and linger.The slower and simpler "Bow of Perception" is initially less impressive, but gradually becomes appealingly erratic and unstable as individual notes start to break free of their pattern to squeal and squirm.Also, the final moments sound like a vividly kinetic laser battle at an unhinged robot dance party.
I am hard-pressed to find any flaws at all with this album, as the only real caveat is that it unavoidably feels less substantial than its massive and wildly ambitious predecessor.That is fine by me, as I am just as happy with a short, filler-free, and oft-brilliant array of new pieces as I would be with another grand statement on par with Patterns.Every single piece on Ecstatic Computation is an inspired one, particularly "Fantas" and "Pinnacles of You."I suppose that arguably makes this Barbieri's "singles album," but it is a remarkably thoughtful, coherent, and thematically consistent one.I am hard-pressed to think of any other artists that embody the balance of surgical exactitude and artistic vision as beautifully as Barbieri, as this album feels like the work of a hyper-intelligent android that has discovered human emotions and feels them quite intensely.While I am generally loathe to describe any artist’s work as "essential," it seems reasonable to state that any collection of contemporary synth albums that does not include either this one or Patterns of Consciousness has quite a glaring hole in it.In the span of only a few years, Barbieri has established herself as one of the select few synthesizer artists who sets new standards and redefines what is possible with each new release.Ecstatic Computation is an excellent illustration of why she has earned that stature.
I almost slept on this unexpectedly incendiary delight, as it deceptively seemed like just another solid drone album based on my initial and brief exposure to it. Then I noticed that Anna von Hausswolff had described it as "This is just.... wow." Given that she does not seem at all like the sort to be floored easily, I revisited A Meditation of Discord for a proper listen. I found myself sharing her sentiment by the end of the opening "Premonition," as Paul and his violin unleash a slow-burning and breathtaking one-man apocalypse in real time. To some degree, it is undeniably Paul's masterful live loop manipulation that makes that piece such a beguiling and impressive feat, but even if he had a full band and a limitless studio budget at his disposal,its fiery crescendo could not be any more harrowing and visceral. While he regrettably tones down his more volcanic impulses for the album's second half, the squirming and psychotically dissonant final moments of the closer beautifully reignite the album's transcendently disturbing brilliance.
There are three different pieces on this album, recorded at three different times and in three different places. Two of the three pieces were improvised live performances and one is a film score, which I suppose makes Paul's Touch debut more of a collection of orphaned pieces than a proper album.The unifying theme seems to be that all of these pieces diverge significantly from the aesthetic terrain of Paul’s Poppy Nogood project (which also explains why he chose to use his own name for this release).That said, it would be more accurate to view A Meditation on Discord solely as a document of Paul’s incandescent and darkly rapturous performance at the 2018 Desert Days festival with a couple of solid bonus tracks thrown in to flesh it out a bit.
Armed with just an open-tuned violin (G-D-G-D) and a small battery of effects pedals, Paul slowly and seamlessly constructed a complexly layered and endlessly transforming 30-minute tour de force in "Premonition."Naturally, the piece’s hellishly explosive crescendo inspires the most awe, yet the greater achievement lies in how elegantly and fluidly Paul is able to make the slow journey from the lushly undulating drones of the opening to its ultimate destination (which resembles a deafening and bloodthirsty plague of demonic locusts).Every single one of the movements in "Premonition" could easily have been expanded into an excellent piece of its own, as even the gentlest, simplest drone passages are enlivened with unusually buzzing textures, vibrant harmonies, and an enveloping warmth.It only gets better from there, as that shimmering landscape blossoms into a vivid fantasia of fluttering, shivering strings and swelling chords.It is a sublimely gorgeous piece until it isn’t: almost imperceptibly, Paul starts curdling everything until it becomes an infernal, and gnarled grotesquerie of itself.By the end, the piece has seamlessly become a complexly layered masterpiece of pure screeching, squirming, and sickly cacophony, and it is absolutely glorious.
I feel truly sorry for the hapless act that had to take the stage after Paul, but a worthy successor eventually materialized in the form of an intense lightning storm that stopped the show later that night.Amusingly, even Zachary Paul himself has a tough time following the bracing intensity of that performance, as "Premonition" is followed here by the gently languorous drones of "Slow Ascent."Unlike its predecessor, "Slow Ascent" does not sneakily evolve into anything deeper, as Paul contents himself with lingering in a dreamlike state of suspended animation.Given the context, however, that makes a lot of sense, as it was improvised as part of a guided meditation event in Los Angeles.Even at his most pastoral though, Paul finds a way to make his work feel fresh and distinctive, as unexpectedly sharp harmonics squeal and twinkle amidst the heavenly soft-focus languor.The album's final piece, "A Person With Feelings," is quite a bit different from the others, however, as it was composed for a currently unreleased short film.Initially, its departures from more conventional film score fare are quite subtle (mostly strange, passing dissonances), but the bottom drops out around the halfway point, and the piece becomes a sci-fi nightmare of throbbing machinery, crackling electronics, and sickly, hallucinatory jabbers and squiggles (all conjured from a violin, no doubt).That mindfuckery proves to be just the prelude to the main course though, as it gives way to a truly demented crescendo of nightmarishly skittering and gibbering lunacy that would not be out of place on one of Rashad Becker's Notional Species albums.
After hearing Discord, I went back to investigate some of Paul’s work as Poppy Nogood and was somewhat surprised to find little hint of the darkness and intensity that was to come.That project lies at the curious intersection where warmly pastoral drone, subtly experimental neo-classical music a la Sean McCann, and melancholy film score overlap.Occasionally there is some bite, but the impact is blunted quite a bit by the more composed and produced aesthetic.It is likable in its own way at times, yet it is nowhere near as memorable as the work captured here. "Premonition" is a fearless, raw, and completely undiluted work where Paul’s vision is directly executed with wild-eyed intensity.It is not entirely raw, as the recording is clean and crowd-noise free, but none of the rough edges have been sanded away by production, and there is no homogenizing, fleshed-out arrangement to diffuse its focus.It is a simple, direct, and dazzling high-wire act that Paul pulls off with astonishing virtuosity and power.I am curious to see if Paul ever revisits this vein again or if this release captures the one perfect and glorious night in which he was unquestionably the Niccolò Paginini of loop architecture.The former would certainly be wonderful, but A Meditation of Discord captures one hell of a memorable performance either way.
"The one you were waiting for: some of Chris Carter's earliest home studio productions appear on Archival Recordings 1973-1977, which was previously part of the Miscellany boxed set, and now available as stand-alone vinyl release.
For fans of Carter, his CTI and Chris & Cosey duo with Cosey Fanni Tutti, or indeed his crucial role in Throbbing Gristle, these recordings scan the relatively serene roots of what would become Industrial Music, and a seismic shift in underground experimental musicks.
Predating both his work in COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, and his zinging debt LP The Spaces Between, the Archival Recordings disc is perhaps of greatest interest, historically and artistically, to long-term fans of Carter’s musick. Spanning 1973-77, it covers the years just before, and after, Throbbing Gristle’s conception, when Carter was clearly in thrall to kosmische and psychedelia, but not beholden to them. Across 13 parts, Carter's take on space music and pulsing early electronics is definitely less whimsical, much darker than other music of that period, progressing chronologically over the LP to reveal a full embrace of electronic music’s dark allure by the time we get to the hellish miasma of "See Sick" [1977]."
More information will eventually be available at Mute.
Transcendental tape loops and bedroom ambient dream states from the teenage mind of Warren Defever aka His Name Is Alive. All The Mirrors In The House is the first of three projected releases of very early works by the Detroit-based savant, prior to signing to 4AD in the late-1980s.
With help transferring aging cassettes and annotating the results from Shelley Salant of Tyvek, the unearthed results are revelatory - a gorgeous sequence of gently decaying tone float made with an incredibly primitive DIY set-up.
As Defever recounts in the liner notes: "By age ten, I had a tape recorder and was using it to capture the sounds of nearby lakes, thunderstorms, and my older brother's LP collection played at the wrong speeds. As a teenager, I got deep into all kinds of music - punk, new age, blues - and played bass in the high school jazz band, as well as studying Bach chorale harmonization and counterpoint. My first album consists of rhythm tracks made of loops of the next door neighbor raking leaves and shoveling the driveway with echoey guitars and vocals with lyrics about ghosts."
Inner sleeve essay and interview by Mike McGonigal, the founder of Chemical Balance magazine and YETI publishing, and the author of acclaimed books on My Bloody Valentine and Galaxie 500.
The first release from The Bug’s PRESSURE label in 2019 is an absolute sound system crusher from JK Flesh (aka Justin Broadrick Godflesh/Jesu/Zonal etc…). Three tracks of the slowest, heaviest, dread techno you are ever likely to hear. Plus a remix from The Bug himself, in full doom riff mode.
Kevin Martin (aka The Bug) is quoted as saying "I'm as proud of dropping this epic 12" as i was of being the person to release Godflesh's Love is a Dog from Hell, many moons ago on my old label Pathological Records. This time around, Justin again redefines absolute heaviness, but in a club format, as he gets sociopathic with his homicidal riffs and deep space explorations. Absolute malevolence, a complete body slaughter. I virtually begged Justin to let me release In Your Pit! Haha. And I'm very happy he agreed and additionally passed me two more tracks of utter dirt."
Shawnee, Ohio, the first album by sonic ethnographer Brian Harnetty on Karl, is an intriguing blend of archive recordings of interviews with residents of that small town and melancholic chamber-folk.
Brian Harnetty (b. 1973) is an interdisciplinary artist working between music composition, sound, and socially engaged art. Rooted in sound archives and the communities connected to them, his body of work contends that the simple act of listening –– to people, places, and their pasts –– can transform our futures.
Both a 2018 A Blade of Grass Fellow for Contemplative Practice and a recipient of the 2016 Creative Capital Performing Arts Award, Harnetty is deeply involved with local issues of Appalachia and the Midwest. He connects sound archives with performance, ecology, and place - an approach for which he was labelled a "sonic ethnographer." Many of his pieces transform archival material –– including field recordings, transcriptions, and historic recordings –– into newly re-contextualized sound collages. For more than a decade, this has led to projects with archives such as the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky, the Sun Ra / El Saturn Archives in Chicago, and the Anne Grimes Collection in the Library of Congress. Harnetty has released four internationally acclaimed albums: American Winter (2007), Silent City (2009), The Star-Faced One (2013, MOJO Magazine's Underground Album of the Year!), and Rawhead & Bloodybones (2015).
In the words of Brian Harnetty himself:
Shawnee, Ohio is a sonic portrait––past and present, real and imagined––of a small Appalachian town in the United States.
Shawnee emerged as a coal mining town in the 1870s. A century of decline forced businesses and people to leave, and today local residents fight to hold their buildings and community up amid a new “fracking” boom. Despite an uncertain future, these residents continue to work for environmental, economic, and cultural enrichment. Since 2010, I have been visiting and working in Shawnee. I have also been retracing the footsteps of my family, who immigrated there as Welsh coal miners in the nineteenth century.
Shawnee, Ohio focuses on eleven portraits of local residents recounting their lives, work, friendships, and deeds. They talk and sing of mining, disasters, underground fires, social life, protest, and hope. They include women and men, are black and white, and are across generations and centuries. Working directly with community members, I use archival samples of their voices and weave them together with my own ensemble. Past and present are tangled together in a haunting world of music, stories, and images."
Danielle de Picciotto was born a nomad on the US Army base at Ft. Lewis in Tacoma, Washington. Thus her journey started, moving from one base to another for years.
In 1987 she moved from NYC to Berlin to initiate the Berlin Love Parade together with her then boyfriend Dr. Motte, to create the Ocean Club with Gudrun Gut, one of her longest standing collaborators, to be engaged to the late Roland Wolf of the Bad Seeds, to become the renowned singer of the Berlin band Space Cowboys, to exhibit her art and films internationally in multiple museums, and from 2001 to start collaborating with Alexander Hacke, founding member of Einstürzende Neubauten.
They married in 2006 and with him her travels continue! The artist couple gave up their home in Berlin 2010, and have been touring the world since.
Danielle de Picciotto’s new album Deliverance speaks of these travels and the state of our world from an eagle’s perspective. Despair and hope lie side by side, mirroring the dark shadows and beauty she has experienced on her journey. Her music is a mixture of spoken word, electronic soundscapes, melancholic violin harmonies, and surreal choirs, moving back and forth from experimental sounds to beautiful melodies managing thus to blend hope and despair into a cosmos of constant flux.
Imagine Laurie Anderson dancing with This Mortal Coil in a strange wasteland of dreams and sounds, that is Danielle's universe. It is one that faces reality and its challenges with mystical, dreamlike wisdom, discovering solutions in unexpected alcoves, offering hope and wonder as an alternative.
The album, a limited edition of just 150 pressed on black vinyl presented case bound with 24 pages of the art she has created during her years of traveling including a hand-numbered and signed screen print.
Her black and white ink sketches that also overlay colourful backgrounds, reveal her personal state of mind and emotions in a college of images and textures that expand her musical visions into a fascinating three dimensional experience.
The new Meat Beat Manifesto album Opaque Couché will be released on May 10th 2019 on CD, vinyl and digital formats. The double vinyl will come in two flavors – regular black vinyl and a limited-edition opaque couché (brown) picture disc (300 copies worldwide) in association with the UK's Electronic Sound magazine.
Jack says of the album: “Opaque Couché”* continues the search for the most imperfect pop song, with sixteen opaque tracks it can be seen as a companion to Impossible Star.”
* Opaque Couché is known as the world’s ugliest color," used on cigarette packets to discourage smoking.
Mariska Baars and Rutger Zuydervelt go way back. And although they regularly work together in the quartet Piiptsjilling, their last effort as a duo stems from 2008, the album Drawn (on Foxy Digitalis/Morc).
But now Eau is here. Eau (pronounced "oh") means "water" in French, and that's how it sounds; like gently rocking waves of sound, or like a babbling sonic stream of fractured audio debris. It also sounds a bit like the equivalent of sunlight dancing on the ripples of a lake's surface.
Eau is not really a song, or a composition. Well, technically it is, but it functions more like an atmosphere that fills the space. Just let it play (on repeat…) and let the sounds hang in the room - let them co-exist with any other sound that's there. Open a window if you wish! Or, experience the trip on headphones, let these soft tones, gentle voices, buzzes and crackles tickle the inside of your skull.
Eau was mastered by the one and only Stephan Mathieu, who made this carefully crafted audio patchwork shine even more.
Argentinian trio Reynols are perhaps one of the most baffling and unabashedly unique artists to arise from the tape/noise underground scene of the past 20 years. Their recorded output has run the gamut of psychedelic rock, pure noise, heavily conceptual works (such as a processed field recording of chickens), and so much more. With the bulk of their work confined to ultra limited cassettes and CDRs, this beautiful collection of six CDs and a DVD, along with extensive liner notes makes for a perfect starting point of collaborations, two unreleased albums, and a slew of unreleased and rare songs.
For better or worse, one of the elements of Reynols that has garnered the most attention is drummer/vocalist/"spiritual leader" Miguel Tomasín, who has Down syndrome.On the surface, this could come across as a gimmick at best, and exploitation at worst.However, it is clear that the other two members, Anla Courtis and Roberto Conlazo are guided by Tomasín’s unconventional artistic outlook and conceptual ideas for music and sound art, making him truly the leader of the band.Reynols could also be pigeonholed into the realm of "outsider art" for their unconventional approach, but that also does them a significant injustice as they are true artists in their own right.
The first disc captures Reynols at their earliest, between 1993 and 1994 and makes it abundantly clear that even from the onset they were a band like no other.From their first tape, "3/7" (from when they were still the Burt Reynols Ensemble) is a ramshackle collage of feedback and distortion, while both "Paleolithic Tango" and "Yuczapoll Suite" are sprawling space rock freak-outs of the highest caliber.On the other side of the spectrum are the experimental treated horns of "Port√°til" and the understated electronic tones of "Pre-Pankow".
Disc four, Conceptual Mogal, compiles a selection of previously unreleased conceptual works from throughout their career.This includes the third part to "10,000 Chickens' Symphony," which comes across more as a mass of chirpy almost-synth sounds constructing a harsh noise wall.The churning, bassy noise that makes up "Reynols Plays the Eiffel Tower" is constructed by Courtis and Conlazo literally using the sounds of the tower to make up a classically noise textured piece."Live at NASA" is a lengthy live performance from Houston, Texas in 2000 that covers all the bases:hissing tapes, buzzing synths, monolithic reverbs, and so forth.
Two unreleased albums from the first half of the 2000s are also included, and both feature Reynols in more traditionally musical territories."Adeos Pebro" from Roniles Dasa Selebro makes for an excellent mid-paced post rock number, with Tomasín’s drumming and vocals at the forefront, while the other two flesh out the mix with infrequent noise outbursts and effects.There is an industrial punk edge to "Loh Vijitanos Cuvana", but by the end of the song there’s a ton of distortion and jazz horn outbursts.Of course there are a few curveballs to be had, such as the twangy folk ballads "123051 Caduelo Ridos" and "Un Dama Niticas."
The other unreleased album, Vedeosmas Tecretre, features a similar combination of off-kilter musical styles.On "Pawe Recy Catu (Gradero)" and "Un Mastro Cademia," Tomasín leads the band with his vocals, culminating in some rather light, pleasantly bent pop songs, while the latter does drift into harsh guitar squall later on.There is an almost pop-punk sound to "Los Cara Utica" that is undeniably catchy, even through its intensely low fidelity production.For "Ruavas Ruman Macia" the band goes full on into Latin disco mode for an even more out there song.Reynols’ traditional noise tendencies shine through on here as well, especially on the distorted loops of "Catuneru Rinti Domati" and the distorted synth throb of "Novi Ormigas Tomica."
Reynols have also taken part in a multitude of diverse collaborations that are captured on Disc six.There are two collaborations with Dr. Socolinksy, a famous Argentinean television personality, both of which feature the band embracing an almost jazzy lounge sound that does not appear much on the other recordings.There is also a collaboration with legendary composer Pauline Oliveros, "El Pajaro Mixto Returns" that is clearly in line with her body of work, consisting largely of spacious, meditative tones and rumbles.At the other end there is their collaboration with Acid Mothers Temple, "Burning the Sun, Gently," which is a slowly unfolding psychedelic mass of sound that peaks in a gloriously overdriven climax.
Perhaps the most striking—and I would argue important—facet of Reynols is that there is an undeniable sense of true joy and fun to their work.The concepts that the trio work with potentially could come across as beard stroking pretense, framed by self-felliating artist statements and unnecessary verbiage, but there is none of that here.Instead, Reynols are motivated by the simple pleasure of creating sounds from a wide array of methodologies, for their own enjoyment as well as anyone who decides to listen.As always with Pica Disk, Lasse Marhaug’s work on curating and the presentation of this material deserves recognition as well.Lavishly presented with individual photo sleeves for the discs and two substantial booklets, one of essays and another of photos, it is another labor of love that truly makes for a complete package.With so much material and so many different styles to be had, Minecxio Emanations 1993​-​2018 is an infinitely engaging collection of heady, yet entirely enjoyable art.
One of the many, many things that I feel vaguely and irrationally guilty about on a daily basis is my failure to take a deep plunge into the Editions Mego-curated Recollection GRM series, as there was a period in my life where I was extremely interested in classic musique concrète and was maddeningly unable to find much of it. Consequently, this series would have been an absolute revelation for me back then. Unfortunately, my passion for early electronic music is considerably diminished these days, as my historical curiosity has long since been sated and a lot of very important pieces have not aged particularly well. That said, there are some pieces that have aged quite well indeed and there are always some long-forgotten gems that have eluded me. This, the third Luc Ferrari release in the series, is one of those very pleasant surprises, resurrecting two lengthy tape pieces that range from playfully anarchic to enigmatically seductive.
The two pieces combined for this release make a curious and unexpectedly complementary pair, as they were never intended to share an album and explore very different sides of Ferrari's iconoclastic vision.Of the two, "Music Promenade" enjoys a far greater stature in Ferrari's oeuvre, standing as one of his most revolutionary and landmark works.It was first premiered in 1970 and was the culmination of five long years of recording and editing.Primarily intended as an installation, the piece was "played" by four separate tape machines and was intended to evoke "a (walking) man…struck by the violence of his surroundings.Nature has disappeared in a whirlwind of warfare and industry in the midst of which he encounters a dying folklore and a lost young girl."I cannot necessarily say that all (or any) of that quite comes across to me, but the piece is unquestionably a cacophonous and surreal mindfuck, as it sounds like an avant-garde theater performance colliding with multiple marching bands.
There are also some alternately space-y and cartoonish touches thrown in to further ensure that I am wrong-footed at all times.To top it all off, each of the four tapes is a slightly different length, so the bizarre juxtapositions between the disparate elements were intended to change their relation to one another with each repetition (the loops are each roughly twenty minutes).Sadly, putting the piece on an actual album necessarily fixes one of the near-infinite variations as the definitive version of the piece, but at least that version is one hell of a wonderfully deranged and vivid sensory assault.Also, it feels refreshingly different from today's insular experimental music scene in that it attempts (to some degree) to capture the life and sounds of the streets and the spirit of an era.Whether or not the average person had any interest in hearing it is certainly up for debate, but if one had happened to blunder into the installation, I suspect it would have made an impact on them.
Of course, there are some caveats.Obviously, it would be unforgivably arrogant describe groundbreaking and visionary art from a half century ago as "flawed," but any honest discussion of this release should at least note that "Music Promenade" did not emerge completely unscathed from its technological limitations and the prevailing trends of the era.Like many other serious composers from the mid-20th century, Ferrari gleefully rejected conventional notions of harmony or melody, but the chromatic blurts and jarring jump cuts that he replaced them with have not aged particularly well.Nor have the more electronic sounds that he sporadically uses.The actual field recordings, however, sound as vibrant and physical as ever.With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that "natural" sounds have a timelessness to them and pointedly unnatural sounds tend to have a very short window before they are eclipsed by whatever the next new thing is.That said, while the more modest "Unheimlich Schön" miraculously managed to nimbly avoid all the perils of embracing an ephemeral future, I am still more struck by the maniacal chaos of "Music Promenade."Ferrari was definitely swinging for the fences with that piece and I always appreciate messy, crazy gambles more than safer work executed masterfully.Much the like other two Ferrari reissues in this series, this one vividly shows exactly why Ferrari and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales have had such a large and lasting impact on the experimental music world.Nevertheless, I was delighted to find that Music Promenade/Unheimlich Schön also transcends its deserved status as A Very Important Historical Document and remains quite a unique and absorbing listening experience to this day.