Lens Deficiency
(Sham Repro) LP $25.00
Lens Deficiency works as a story intentionally withholding several of its components (dialogue, music), requiring the listener’s individual pattern recognition development to determine how the phantom linearity of Pete Cann’s half-hour construction is “viewed,” processed and evaluated. But it’s even better as pure musique concrète sound collage. Aspiring game-show contestants could feel provoked into trying to recognize what movies the hundreds of sounds here are appropriated from; thoughts and prayers they’ll become bored by such meaningless, dead-end cochlea-flexing and instead discern the new, unique path Cann has machete’d out of the darkness for their benefit. He leaves impenetrable saturation to career edgelords, cartoon-y kitsch to pie-throwing idiots, and dialogue to the French. The favored strategy here is measured placement of audio events that are complex enough on their own; which is not to say moments of sublime layering are absent. On the contrary, one’s imagination might linger on John Cage’s sound-effects-only score for The City Wears A Slouch Hat, the original 250-pager that CBS balked at and is gone forever, or perhaps the blunt force trauma style of the Lanz / Eb.er radio show Psychic Rally. The range of genres and eras represented is wide, which accounts for the dynamics and contrast, while at the same time Cann’s ear leans heavily on compatibility. Neither random nor composed, Lens Deficiency’s heavy lifting is done by intuition and the joy of a perfect coincidence.