gtaylor@cornell.UUCP (04/13/84)
This will definitely not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'd like to recommend an excellent new album to all you adventuresome types on the net. The album is called "incidents Out of Context", and it is on the Flying Fish label from an outfit called Other Music. They started out initially as one of those Americanized quasi-gamelan outfits (like Barbara Benary's Gamelan Son of Lion), this one located out of the Berkely area. THeir music was done on their own instruments which they built themselves, and their first record was pretty heavily influenced by the formal aspects of gamelan compositions. Their second album is a real delight n that they have taken those insights and tried to make a unique music of their own from it. This can't relly be called even "gamelan derivative" stuff anymore. The record is full of hammered dulcimers, dirty electric guitar, synthesizers, and their own instruments. The mix reminds me just the tiniest bit of some of the metallophone based counterpoint that Kerry Minnear worked with with Gentle Giant. The opening cut "compulsive behaviour" sounds like a cross between "The Pink Panther", Dave Brubeck's "Unsquare Dance" and a few other things, as played by a lounge band in Jakarta. It's rambunctious, spirited, devoid of the formal rigour and deadly seriousness that characterizes a bit of the "new music" scene, and one of the most successful bits of hybridization I'v heard in quite some time. Only difficulty is that you may have a hard time finding it in the midst of your record store's filing system. Happy Hunting! "And we saw St. Elmo's fire splitting ions in the ether..." gtaylor@cornel