Traveler's Advisory is a record displaced in time, but the fact that it must have seemed apart from its era when it was first released in 1986 is the very reason its 2010 reissue seems totally contemporary.
Matthew Young's music never quite fit into any one mold -- he was an acoustic folk musician with a penchant for electronic explorations and a serious student of avant-garde computer music who loved hammering out tunes on his dulcimer. The place where those disparate pursuits meet is exclusively the domain of
Traveler's Advisory. The easy way out would be to simply call
Young the
Arthur Russell of New Jersey, wielding a dulcimer instead of a cello, but that's misleading.
Russell never really embraced the "serious" academic end of electronic music coming out of places like Princeton University, where
Young studied the same, and
Young didn't delve into dance music the way
Russell did.