gtaylor@cornell.UUCP (Greg Taylor) (05/14/84)
G'day. Here's a couple of new albums that you might find of interest: Vision (Shankar, Jan Gabarek, Palle Mikkelborg: ECM): THose of you familiar with W.L.C. SHankar's 10 stringed electric violin (you've heard it on the latest Talking Heads and Echo and the Bunnymen's PORCUPINE) may need little in the way of introduction to this. SHankar is an Indian classical violinist of considerable reputation who has a strong interest in more popular idioms. His first ECM outing was strictly Indian infulenced...lots of raga style stuff. THis time, he's produced a spare, more chromatically inclined record of duets and triaos with some of the ECM stalwarts. I would liken the record to Gabarek's solo saxophone performances on Eventyr..Simple, folk-melody based lines (sometimes of additive length) done in unison with a second instrument. There's virtually no percussion, save one piece-lots of time domain sweetening and a touch of flanger. The lovely feature of all this is the mix of styles-the violins ability to gliss between pitches (western violinists may find this a bit maddening) is set against the horn's tendency to hit the pitch exactly. This play of pitch and unison makes for a lovely sense of tension and release at tplay. Of course, the usual ECM "light through the window" sound, even with the electronics. Junk Culture (Orchestral Manoevres inthe Dark, Virgin): Hot on the heels of that inventive stiff Dazzle Ships, OMD have decided to tack for more commercial waters on this one. A real grab bag of influences...dub percussion, snappy horns, and much of the sampled experiments that made dazzle ships such an interesting record. This record has a real slick polish (and a hit single, Locomotion) that may actually distract the listener from some of the more subtle and inventive harmonic things going on (the sort of instrumentals that start showing up on Architecture and Morality)-the ENglish edition has a marvelous one-sided single that should have showed up on the record. OMD is in that peculiar position of having started a line of inquiry early on, only to find everyone doing it-and being forced to modify their act. THis is about as refined an interesting bit of work as they could have managed and still kept their record company happy. ASs the title would suggest, disposability and transience plays a big role in this one (could this be yet another example of the Catholic revival among ENglish new-wavers, following in the footsteps of John Foxx?). Dance Dance Dance.