Leather straps turned side-ways after opening.
Listening to Interplay by John Foxx and the Maths I am reminded of my initial acquaintance with fellow Brit Peter Forrest's monumental two part tome The A-Z of Analogue Synthesisers, the sense of incantory sonic magic resulting from playing (with) an array of knobs and cables perfecting imperfection, all sonorous smears wonderfully summed up in Foxx's 1980 masterwork Metamatic..."click...click...drone." With the help of synth archivist/musician/artist Benge, Mr. Foxx, using pre-1985 synth technology (all listed for each track) has made a timely statement of analogue intent with great pop songs! If there was any justice in the world of electro-pop, "Evergreen" would hit the charts with an electric jolt! Sharing the same iconic british contradictory mindspace that allows for the home of the Industrial Revolution AND the timeless bucolic garden world of some far-off arcadian England to live together, Foxx, along with other fellow analogue synthesists like Ghostbox's Belbury Poly, have returned to a simpler world devoid of laptop menus and perfect pre-sets...Foxx sings " There is a place we once knew...Forever evergreen..." and the "forever changes" (a nod to Love?) of oscillators made beautifully unstable by temperature and moisture...a future nostalgia. Benge's contributions, sequences,synths, electro-percussion and treatments add layers of analogue grandeur, the summed sound of which is stunning in its direct percussive and atmospheric expression. Foxx and Benge have breathed fresh wave-shapes into a genre Mr. Foxx helped to invent. Bravo!
With interviews with Don Buchla and Morton Subotnick, The San Francisco Tape Music Center / 1960s counterculture and the avant-garde edited by David W. Bernstein, is, excuse the expression, a "heady" read filled with both historical and aesthetic insights into the arts, music, and the tenor of those revolutionary times when anything seemed possible. Warmly recounted, these innovative times meticulously detailed remind us that there was a time before the internet and laptops when artists gave birth to masterful expression with limited means and indeed, to paraphrase William Blake, saw heaven in a wildflower and stopped to tape it!
With proper apocalyptic overtones, Current 93's 2000 release I Have A Special Plan For This World explores territory poked at earlier by Alvin Lucier and Robert Ashley. Centered around a text from Thomas Ligotti, the usual C93 suspects, probably for the most part Steven Stapleton, create a nightmarish background against which David Tibet recites the text. By the end of the piece Tibet's words become a gitchy smeared liminal sound imbued with horribly dark overtones. Though the "special plan" is never explained, we can rest assured of its unpleasant nature. Spoken word sound art has never been so nerve-tingling.
Phantom Orchard, the duo comprised of Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori, released one album simply called Phantom Orchard (Mego 071, 2004). What makes this album special is that Zeena Parkins not only plays her usual acoustic and electric harps but also produces a wonderful array of noises using some vintage electronic instruments from the Audities Foundation Collection: a Gleeman Pentaphonic Clear, a Moog Modular and a Buchla 200 Series electronic music instrument(Don Buchla rejects the word synth in favor of this more appropriate terminology). Ikue Mori is listed as playing "electronics," though certainly she is using her laptop.