Wow and oh man,
this CD gave me a headache. But only in the best possible sense.
Made at Mills Tape Music Center and the University of Toronto Electronic
Music Studio, it does not sound like it was composed in a tranquil
studio environment. It sounds like it was grown in a laboratory
gone awry. It reminds me, only in passing, of some Stan Brackhage
films where he buried the reels in his garden and pulled them out
a few years later to see how it went. But I like this CD much better,
among other reasons because Oliveros has a point.
Her hippy instinct,
probably internalized from spending too much time with fellows from
her generation, does not overpower the striking and frankly noisy
ideas contained in her music. Her "Deep Listening" workshops
go somewhere between Zen, Woodstock, and method acting techniques,
but something about her presence throws otherwise distasteful references
refreshingly off balance -- after all these years. Likewise, this
CD consisting of three works gathered from the 1960s, still sounds
"new", if not "experimental".
Her instinct to
mimic the natural world with the electronic world, as in "Bog
Road", is fundamentally flawed, and I think she knows this,
which is why the results are so strange. She coaxed all that old
equipment to become electric frogs and swamp bloops, and on the
way, made sounds quite unheard before.
A few bits give
away the time which it was made, most notably, the duration of each
track. Ok, they are not really that long, but at 17 minutes, 14
minutes and 33 minutes respectively, they test the patience of the
MTV generation used to 3 minutes of anything. I have to admit an
affinity for the short work, and I would rather hear 10 works at
five minutes each rather than three of 20 minutes. (sort of a stupid
way to judge a CD, but there it is...) In a way, their length and
single minded intensity betray their "experimental" nature,
as opposed to a sense of compositional refinement that happens as
movements age.
On the otherhand,
they are solid works with focus and brevity, and my comments are
probably unnecessary.
A lot of contemporary
noise acts should buy this CD and cry on their whammy bars because
they will never reach so far as these three old pieces.
Shining sounds
and cool, lighthearted graphic design from Ms Oliveros and the Pogus
people: a treasure.