Guam-born composer Mike Svoboda, a student of
Karlheinz Stockhausen, offers in the booklet for this CD an extensive philosophical justification for his mixture of his own music with that of
Erik Satie. The underlying ideas have to do with the relationship between technology and musical style, with a low-tech ensemble including trombone and varying odd keyboards -- accordion, melodica, toy piano -- offered as a theoretical alternative realization of the ethos of
Satie's music. Thus the selections on the disc are of three kinds: 1) compositions by
Satie himself, arranged by Svoboda for voice and a combination of his low-tech (the word is his) instruments, 2) original instrumental works by Svoboda, and 3) paired pieces consisting of selections from
Satie's Sports et Divertissments, instrumentally arranged, and Svoboda's settings of
Satie's French texts from that work (provided in the booklet in French, English, and German). Most of the tracks are extremely short, many of them less than a minute long. Even the straight
Satie is much altered from its original form, not least because the pitches of the melodica and toy piano don't accord with the tempered scale and would, in this context, be called microtonal. The booklet essay is dense, but the music is enjoyable in a loopy way, something like what might happen if
Stockhausen and
Tom Waits got together to enjoy an evening of
Satie's music. And it's not hard to imagine that
Satie himself would have enjoyed such a reimagining of his music, perhaps as much as or more than any other composer. One of a series of odd
Satie discs to come along in the first decade of the new century, this effort shows just how strongly his example continues to inspire new creative thinking.