Taylor, Gregory - Amalgam: Aluminum/Hydrogen
SKU
POL0702
This is a beautifully packaged and presented album of a bit noisy and extremely cool ambient music. This was recorded in a single live performance in Madison, WI in 2006.
"When two cultures meet it can be a collision or a marriage. Gregory Taylor’s deep, 25-year love affair with the music of Java has evolved into a new synthesis of tradition and innovation, moving way beyond imitation into an uncharted wilderness. Amalgam begins with bell-like tones in a digital approximation of a gamelan, but gradually veers into long, non-percussive synthesizer tones, in slendro scales, with structures as informed by Basil Kirchin or Philip Glass as gamelan. This completely unique cross-polination is subtle and rich, paradoxically evoking the beauty and languidity of Indonesian culture while delving increasingly into noisy and discordant synthesizer voices. It is remarkable how the spirit of Java remains intact as the music progresses from tradition to sublime innovation."-Robert Carlberg
"His first CD for PoL, Amalgam: Aluminum / Hydrogen proves to be a marriage of buoyancy and structure. It is a single unedited recording of a live improvised performance by a radiaL virtuoso that unites the tunings and epicyclic forms of gamelan music that characterized Taylor’s 80s cassette culture releases with the timbres and aural surfaces of glitch, ambient and lowercase musics."