gtaylor@cornell.UUCP (Greg Taylor) (03/28/84)
loved the nice piece on Material et. al., but the suggestion that the Material people have any sort of corner on wierdness (notably the mention that Bill Laswell is a harmolodic player) seems a bit farfetched. Perhaps it would be better to say that they take th Postmodern idea (tyr Brian Eno as an early propagator of this idea maybe) of the importance of DECISIONS over actual digital skill. Material is involved with the extension of that idea in the way that the music market defines style or genre. All they've really done is to quite successfully take the formal vocabulary of studio-dependent no-wave, marry that (in Laswell's cases) to a firm undrstanding of one's instrument, and to try different approaches to genres one wouldn't ordinarily use. I think that FUTURE SHOCK owes a great deal more to NY scratch than to Material: the boys merely decided that it was the best producer's antidote to the tinkertoy funk that Hancock was cranking out at the time. Check out the Daniel Ponce album NEW YORK NOW. It's the same sort of clever grafting of the Material approach to some body of music-Cuban funk a la Irakere in the case of the Ponce album. You might also refer to the old "some of Material as a power trio" album "KILLING TIME" by Massacre (Fred Frith and Laswell and ex-Material Fred Maher (now with Lou Reed's road band??) for that same sense. There's a new Peter Gabriel tune on the soundtrack for "Against All Odds", which you may not get around to hearing for the Phil Collins "wall of oatmeal" ballad that averyone is playing. :w :e
jeff@dciem.UUCP (Jeff Richardson) (04/03/84)
Since there's been a lot of talk about Material lately, I thought I
should mention that I recently heard a few seconds of a new EP with
Material backing up Jamaican reggae star Yellowman. What an interesting
combination! It's hard to judge it having heard so little of it, but
in it are evident elements of both reggae and fusion, with maybe a little
more fusion than reggae. The DJ said the collaboration was set up by
the record company in an effort to broaden Yellowman's horizons and make
him more popular outside of Jamaica.
Jeff Richardson
DCIEM, Toronto