Category: LIBRARY

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Tresor de la Langue has to be one of one of the truly great projects of the last half-century and is therefore a very hard act to follow. But on this quietly revolutionary record Rene has found his way to a music that can fairly be described as new; new enough to make it hard to explain, even though it’s easy enough to listen to. For the majority of the pieces here Rene has dispensed with obvious overall form and traditional compositional logic and replaced them with patterns of events; there’s no ABC, no development, no thematic integration, instead we have a kind of experiential logic, a road you share with Rene that’s poly-stylistic and unpredictable, stabilised with rhythms and harmonies when you need them and populated with sounds that exist autonomously and sometimes seem to belong in another story – but all bound tightly into something like what Stockhausen called moment form.. with space added. A range of recognised instruments are used, especially electric guitars, contrabass and Daxophone, as well as a host of non-instruments and invented instruments, combined to construct Webern-like orchestral distributions of sounds. Of the seven compositions featured, five probe deeply into the klangfarbenmelodie / event-nexus mode described above; of the other two, one is a tour de force for guitars, electric toothbrushes and snatches of conversation, the other (and the oldest here) a more conventional work for four contrabasses. These are all studio assemblies, meticulously crafted, that deploy their materials with a fine ear for timbre and stereophony. They are also surprisingly attractive and easy to listen to; part lounge, part C20 experimental, part je ne sais quoi.

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1-9. Ouin Cé Ça (Vox Pop 3)

Third in a noble series: first was Morgan Fisher’s classic 1980 release, then an expanded second volume at the millennium – and now we have this third, even more expanded homage. The idea is simplicity itself: invite a selected body of artists to make a piece one minute long and then group them together in through-listening blocks. There are 124 contributors here, some well-thumbed (The Residents, Fred Frith, Stewart Lee, Billy Bragg, David Thomas, John Otway, R. Stevie Moore, Peter Blegvad, Henry Kaiser, Attila the Stockbroker, Terry Riley, Half Japanese, Tom Robinson, Bob Drake, Alternative TV, The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, &c. and many others lesser known or as well known but in other musical circles – including members of Van der Graaf Generator, Curved Air, Zoviet France, Stomu Yamashta’s Red Buddha Theatre, Soft Machine, Fairport Convention, The Blockheads,The Stranglers, John’s Children, Alternative TV, Caravan, The Damned, Global Village Trucking Company, King Crimson, Adam and the Ants and The Monochrome Set. It’s a snapshot, a sampler, a box of variety and delights – and a window on the state of play: in all, a useful and worthwhile undertaking. 2 CDs in a slipcase with a thick  book.

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