Gyromancy

by The Mnemonist Orchestra
ReR Megacorp, Thornton Heath. Surrey UK, 2004
CD-ROM, ReR MN2, £12.50
Distributor’s website: http://www.rermegacorp.com

CMCD: Six Classic Concrete, Electroacoustic and Electronic Works, 1970-1990

by Various Artists
ReR Megacorp, Thornton Heath. Surrey UK, 2004
CD-ROM, ReR CMCD-RE, £11.50
Distributor’s website: http://www.rermegacorp.com.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, USA

mosher@svsu.edu

One likes to think that a benefit of our Postmodernist century is that all music that we ever liked or heard is now available for our collections; this reviewer recently purchased Farfetched Records’ Destroy All Monsters "Broken Mirrors" disc for tracks recorded live at a concert I attended in1978. ReR Megacorp has reissued four pieces by the Mnemonists, an electroacoustic group from Fort Collins, CO that later recorded under the name Biota, first issued on 7" (45 r.p.m. vinyl, presumably) in 1983. They process a wide range of musical instrument sources, and the CD is enhanced with a book of artworks.

"Gyromancy A" begins with distant Edgard Varese-like doom-booms. A marchlike drum corps enters, throatsinging interweaving with its bagpipes. There are malevolent, scraping dangernoises, a burst of sawing, and big portentous silences in between. "Gyromancy B" mixes moody chimes with sounds that evoke a swarm of bees attacking the string section in an orchestra pit, the cut gamely chugging forward like a railroad train. "Nailed" suggests the cries and growls of a mismanaged zoo’s animal house, and sewer echoes beneath it. "Tie" creates a snuffling pig scraping something off a shoe, his successes marked by quick annunciatory piano glissandos.

The same label’s CMCD: Six Classic Concrete, Electroacoustic and Electronic Works 1970-1990 collects a variety of compositions by international composers. John Oswald is probably best known for his Plunderphonic CD a decade ago, all copies destroyed at the behest of Michael Jackson’s record company. Jackson’s music was one source (Michigan’s MC5 was another) for that rich audio sampling and remixing project, but collaging Jackson’s head and leather jacket upon a nude female body probably didn’t endear him to the plaintiff either. On this CD, Oswald’s speeding up of Erik Satie’s "Parade" sounds like exactly that. Did Punks shout "Faster!" at Satie’s concerts?

"Aide Memoire" by Georg Katzer is made up of German radio broadcasts 1933-1945 to paint an audio mural of the Third Reich. It’s a very cinematic collage, a Dada animated cartoon like a haywire collaboration between John Heartfield, George Grosz, and Warner Bros. director Tex Avery. Broken by the white whoosh of a nervous hand rotating the radio dial, it processes both angry Nazi speeches and uplifting choral song. It doesn’t take much to make Hitler scary, and the skillful assemblage ends with a metallic clank, as if der Feuhrer were mercifully bonked on the head with a lead pipe.

Lutz Glandien’s "Es Lebe" uses tuba as its source . . . yet these multi-tracked and processed tubas have grown aeronautic, and we seem to hear the pneumatic propulsion of craft resembling a Popular Science melding of dirigibles and Electrolux vacuum cleaners. "A Quiet Gathering" by Steve Moore strings together field recordings at various sites where we hear children’s voices, churchbells and rowing on a river. It may be a bit too long to sustain the simple concept, though parts of it do have the quotidian-becomes-epiphanic quality of the dawn of cinema, like the Lumière brothers’ "Train Arriving in Station". Similarly, Jaroslave Krcek creates a sonata that’s largely like a cat’s meow.

The last track is a fine piece of rethought audio Pop Art, as strong as the best Plunderphonics works of John Oswald. Richard Trythall’s "Ommagio a Jerry Lee Lewis", opens with sonic glimpses of the old rock n’ roller Lewis, as if a curtain coyly parts momentarily then snaps shut. We strain to hear tantalizing bits of the pop narrative "Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On" as the song gets subjected to speed changes, filtering, loops and reverberation by Trythall. Sometimes this results in the song sputtering into bouncing fragments like ball bearings or air-rifle BBs emerging from a chute. Sometimes the listener is spattered with pulsing bursts of vocals or guitar lead, and sometimes we have to duck from the demon pianos swooping from the rafters that Trythall has unleashed from Jerry Lee’s tortured soul.