This is one of those that I perhaps played five times in the year I bought it (1985 or '86) and has likely been left untouched ever since.
However, the timing of this listen is good because I recently started reading Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
As with Michael Nyman's album in the same "Obscure" series, it catches Adams and Bryars in their experimental phases where the Cagean hand of indeterminacy is heavy on their shoulders. They give their ensembles a set of rules and constraints, which allow for chance variations, and then leave them to "implement" their designs. Hence two performances of the same piece can sound markedly different.
I've kept up with the work of both Bryars and Adams intermittently. Bryars had a 60th birthday concert at the Royal Festival Hall three years ago and played in the Derek Bailey tribute gig, and I saw Adam's Nixon in China at the opera (extremely rare for me) last year. They've both allowed themselves to become more deterministic.
However, it's the two Christopher Hobbs pieces on this album that I enjoy most. He had completely dropped from my view in recent decades, though consulting his Wikipedia entry shows that he is still composing — having released a double album called, promisingly, Sudoku Music, only eight months ago — but primarily working as a lecturer. He even has a MySpace page, including the track Aran, which appears on this album. The new tracks on there are rather appealing, too. Hobbs includes in his influences Carl Stalling, soundtrack composer for cartoons, and "the development of cheap and cheerful technology". I'm actually quite tempted to get one of his recent albums.
| Buy from eil.com (subject to availability) | Discogs entry for this album |
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