Tickmayer, Stevan Kovacs - Repetitive Selective Removal of One Protecting Group
SKU
RERST2
Stevan is best known to this audience for his work with The Science Group. The part below about sounding like all possible musics being stuck in a bag together sorta sums up my very confused feelings about this after only one listening. More time is definitely required for this one... "After a long absence Stevan roars back with this dense and complex work - a rare example of a truly uncategoriseable music: neither electronic nor acoustic but somewhere in between - or outside. Taken often at impossible Nancarrow/late Zappa/Ligeti tempi, a cascade of material constantly forms and reforms into different kinds of order: fragments of New Complexity performed with a kind of rock, dance, jazz undercurrent; shards of popular musics dressed in contemporary classical and electroacoustic clothes; debris from the C20 soundworld train-wrecked together as if all possible musics had been crammed into a bag, smithereened, and then somehow self-regenerated into viable but hybrid mutant forms: a kind of Burgess Shale of emergent musical life. However, alien as some of this music may seem at first hearing, it is coherent, through-composed and wholly intentional; nothing is arbitrary and every detail counts. Microtonality, polymetricality, slicing, shuffling and extreme processing sit easily alongside atmospherics, performance, and subtle explorations of timbre and acoustic space. Perhaps it is a monster, but it is a viable monster; a form so unfamiliar that it may take a few listenings just to learn how to listen to it. Order will percolate out, with attention, because it is there. The techniques I employed on this CD are heterogeneous in the broadest sense: live playing alongside sequencing, sampling, massive sound processing and some leftovers from previous Science Group recording sessions (mainly those of Chris Cutler and Bob Drake), then re-arrangement and re-orchestration. However, the complete material as usual - is completely written out; even when it sounds quite improvised." [ReR]