You'll have to indulge me for a moment while I do one of those "back in the day" reminiscences (Gideon Coe has correctly pointed out that, back in the day, nobody said "back in the day").
It was 1989. [Pause] I read a review of this album. It wouldn't have been a long review: it's way off mainstream and column inches were rationed. But it must have mentioned the musical setting of William Burroughs spoken word recordings. I'd never heard of Material. I might have heard of Bill Laswell by then, but the review may not have mentioned that he was the leader of Material.
And on the basis of just this flimsy whisp of data, I traipsed up to Record Collector in Broomhill and asked the bloke with the long hair (the one who told me about the carrot on the cover of Third Reich'n'Roll) if he could find details of an album by Material, and, if so, could he order it for me, please? Some weeks later, I asked if my order had been successful. Yep, £11.99.
Only when I got it home did I get to hear what it sounded like.
It's a mongrel genre-wise. The first track sounds a bit like The Hour of Two Lights. One of the others, Deliver I think, is more West African, but then the next track is like something from the Black Rock Coalition, before it winds up with a more ambient piece.
I read a lot of Burroughs in the late '80s (I must go back to it sometime, though I tried My Education: A Book of Dreams on holiday last year, and it was crap). According to Wikipedia, the Burroughs excerpts are from The Western Lands, though I couldn't find them on a quick skim of my copy just now.
MusicBrainz entry for this album Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to this album in full at Last.fm |
Comments