A Wire cover CD from four years ago, this one samples a range of mostly electronic examples of sonic R&D and innovation.
Many of the pieces have postmodern references to other domains, so Teamtendo's Santana Sucks may be an interpretation of a Santana song (I'm not familiar with them all!) played on Nintendo hardware; Thomas Köner crops up again (last seen here), with Asmus Tietchens, and a piece called Kontakt der Jünglige (sic), which must be a reference to Karlheinz Stockhausen; and I'd guess Kim Cascone's Bourbaki Conjecture may refer to this esoteric bit of mathematics.
Richard Chartier's piece is from an album dedicated to Morton Feldman, and it justifies his reputation for "microsound, a form of extreme minimalism", since it frequently seems like just a test tone, though actually it's more interesting.
On first listen [The User]'s extract from their Symphony #2 for dot matrix printers felt like a gimmick. You get this in avant garde circles sometimes: going for the cheap laugh. Tangential example: at this gig a couple of days ago, some bloke called Chapman sought to keep our attention by playing his guitar with, variously, a power drill and a hair dryer. It didn't make him sound any better, and what was most irritating was that he'd introduced himself saying, "I'm going to make some noise for about ten minutes" — and then proceeded to play for 25 minutes, badly. Which meant that the headliners were late, and I missed a fair bit of their set. Anyway, back to the dot matrix printers and their amusingly titled .^.^%^%^%. On second listen I realised it worked well and made for surprisingly effective music.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
Rate Your Music entry for this album
Comments