Various: Network, Volume 2 - 54 Music Miniatures

I got this from Rare and Racy — it still has the hand-written price label on it (£10). According to the comment on this entry, there's a benefit campaign to keep the shop alive, and I hope that's successful.

Yes, there are 54 tracks spread over the 79 minutes of this CD. They were assembled and compiled by Martin Archer, who has come up a couple of times already (1, 2). It's weird to think that it may be 20 years since I first came across him. And, in that time, almost under my nose, he has stealthily accumulated a very impressive body of work.

The thing about 54 tracks — and they're edited so that they overlap by a second or two — is that you don't hear them as 54 tracks. You hear them as one Zornesque piece. Occasionally your ear picks out something individual (like Mick Beck's characteristic twanging of his saxophone) or extraordinary. The truly extraordinary piece is Howard Ingram's Boom Bang a Bang (War is Over?). This is what the sleeve notes say:

Belfast's Bedford Street. A car bomb placed at the front door of a restaurant means diners have been removed to the back yard. A drunk decides to leave. A policeman restrains him. The bomb explodes. People are left in darkness and panic as glass rains down on them. War is over? You decide.

The track is just an edited sound collage. I don't know if Ingram has edited lots of little sonic 'facts' together to make a composite 'fiction', but it's incredibly effective. I was on Victoria Station in 1991 when an IRA bomb went off in one of the litter bins. It's a big station, and I was just out of sight of the carnage, though obviously I saw the screaming people running away from the blast towards me. Precisely because you can't see anything on this recording, the blast seems more protracted and the screams that follow it more terrifying than I remember in the case of the 'real thing'.

See the details and buy the album direct from the source.

Comments

[Andy Baker]

Jesus Christ - I think we were separated at birth. You've got the same record collection as me. (Are there lots of people who've got Steve Reich, Big Black, Mahavishnu Orchestra and Scott Walker sitting on the same shelf? If so why haven't I met them?)

[David]

Andy, I fear none of us are as unique and individual as we like to think. And thanks to the net, we are more likely to bump into our clones.