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Barcode Music
by GÄnter Schroth
Archegon, Germay, 2000.
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell University of Wales College, Caerleon Campus, Newport NP18 3YH, Wales.
E-mail: pepperell@cwcom.net


To combine two of the most potent genres in music must have seemed like a good idea in the 1970s when a number of "jazz/rock fusion" outfits started to appear on the fringes of the contemporary music scene. National Health typified this kind of pacy, often frantic, style of composition and performance which ultimately seemed to appeal to neither of its constitutive constituencies. This album contains a series of live recordings made during a US tour in 1979 by one short-lived line-up of a band that went through many personnel shifts in its 5-year existence.

Although technically arresting, to its detriment the genre tends to combine the complexity of jazz with the pretensions and indulgences of rock. What results is a dense, intense, but largely sterile soundscape that makes up for what it lacks in soulfulness with cleverness. The band demands the most attention when it allows musical phrases to relax and develop (as in parts of the title track "Playtime"). But more often it projects an intricate dissonance that distances the uninitiated listener. This CD contains detailed sleeve notes by the band's drummer about the context in which the recordings were made.

"All electronic sounds are 100% barcode controlled", runs the strap line on GÄnter Schroth's album from experimental music label Archegon. This could be taken as either a polemical statement on the contemporary music industry or an assurance of the methodological integrity of this product. Either way, it is slightly disappointing that "barcode music" sounds like what you'd expect barcode music to sound like. As presented through the apparatus of GÄnter Schroth the barcoded patterns of domestic products produce an industrial "scronk" of wet synthetic noise. Consequently hearing this record is like listening to an alien sound-effects CD, parts of which are hauntingly evocative and other distressingly intrusive.

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