Transit

by John Fitz Rogers (composer) and Michael Nicollela (guitar).
Gale Recordings, Seattle, WA, 2002.
Total duration: 43:50. With inlay text by Brian Robison.
Gale 02-003.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Transit is a two-part, eleven-track composition for guitar, keyboards and computer. It was written for guitar virtuoso Michael Nicollela in a symphonic electropop language, with references to the music of the 1970s and 1980s.The accompanying booklet says that "[it is a] dizzying combination of acoustic traditions and electronic transformations, of popular colours and classical architecture, of worldly grit and celestial grandeur" and I don't doubt that it is meant to be just that. The music meanders between a pastiche of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, the sounds of "In the house of the Crimson King" and Jimi Hendrix-like guitar improvisations set against a background of Nancorrow-ish computer chords and drumbox beats.

Technically speaking, Rogers makes use of the technical possibilities of the computer to create impressively complex patterns. He uses the timbral spectrum of the guitar to mollify the flat-sounding electric organs, keyboards and drums of the computer-driven synthesizer and mixes in melodic lines that refer to the chorus of the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth, to name but one. If this sounds like an amalgam, that is exactly what it is. An 'alchemy of sounds', a delirious showing-off of crossovers and man-machine virtuosity.

The aim of the piece was, according to the booklet, to illustrate three types of transit: between the live performance and the studio recording, between the rationally conceivable and the physically possible, and between earthly sensuality and heavenly joy. It is pompous and intimate, pulsating and meditative, epic and poetic. And all of this in a semi-classical structure with a genuine though difficult to recognize theme and wide-ranging variations. And here lies the problem with this music; it tries to prove too much. If you want to tell ten tales in a single story, there is always a risk that you will end up with nothing understandable at all. Alas this is nearly the case here, after I had been listening for almost three quarters of an hour, the only thing that stuck was a sense of being transported back to the late 1970's, and on second and third listening, this feeling still (if faintly) persisted - I shed a tear for my lost youth and turned to something less presumptuous.