This excellent compilation was released by Elektra/Nonesuch as a kind of sampler of post-
Cage-ian trends in electronic music at the time. Curated by composer
Nicolas Collins, it reflects the sort of music being championed at venues like New York City's the Kitchen, wherein various aspects of world music, jazz, and rock were being filtered through and atomized by composers who had been students of, for example,
David Tudor and
Alvin Lucier, both of whom are represented here. Generally speaking, the pieces are quite accessible to the newcomer, frequently employing catchy rhythms (
Neil B. Rolnick's excerpt from "Balkanization") and relatively lush beds of sound.
Laetitia deCompiegne Sonami's wartime romance story begins calmly enough, read in a steady voice, but gradually becomes eroded by electronic glitches, reducing it to a series of abstract sounds that retain the cadence of speech even as the meaning disappears. When the voice is reconstituted at the end of the piece, the listener has, intentionally, been deprived of some crucial parts of the story. The one track that doesn't quite fit in is
Voice Crack's excerpt from "A Spoonful of Tea in a Barrel Full of Honey." This Swiss duo operates much more from a post-AMM aesthetic, their rough-and-tumble barrage of "cracked everyday electronics" injecting some gritty life into a selection of pieces that, for all their attractiveness, have a tendency to slide toward the academic end of contemporary electronic music.
Gene "Blue Gene" Tyranny's languidly wacky UFO story, with
Tom Buckner's recitation over bubbling piano and electronics, brings the disc to a satisfyingly weird close. ~ Brian Olewnick