Alice In Wonderland
(Soleilmoon) Used 5xCD $40.00
“This surreal and wildly ambitious project began quite humbly in 1988” explains Brainwashed, and took five years to complete. Greif finds “inspiration in literature, exotic field recordings, and musique concrète. As a result, [this eclectic] stew … [blends] radio serials, tape loop cut-ups, avant garde classical cacophony, clanking early industrial textures, horror movie soundtracks, and brooding ambient over the course of six mind-bending hours…. [In doing so, he] exercises a great deal of tact, largely allowing the narration to continue unmolested and seldom plunging into lengthy instrumental stretches…. [M]ost of the creative heavy lifting on the album involves the skillful and aggressive manipulation of the actors’ voices, surrounding the narration with disjointed phonemes, pitch-shifting, panning, backwards voices, and sundry other neat tricks…. [W]hen Grief does attack the actual narrative flow, he generally does it to supremely hallucinatory effect, making Alice and her friends sound submerged, fragmented, or narcotically slowed-down when it suits the story…. [D]issonance and disorientation serve the themes of the story quite well…. Greif … giv[es] the story a compelling dynamic arc, as his clanging rhythms and garish sound colors bring … animation and tension to the more action-packed parts of the tale, which in turn heightens the impact of the woozier, more drugged-sounding passages…. Of course, six solid of hours of [electronic landscapes, desconstructed text, computer manipulations], and mechanized…, unsettling, creepy and Kafkaesque … psychedelia is certainly exhausting, but … total immersion seems like the only way to fully experience a work this singular and consuming…. Alice in Wonderland is a spectacular achievement. Third edition, remastered in 2000. In multi-disc amaray case with the barcode brutally sliced off the paper inlay.
Bacteria and Gravity
(RRRecords) Used LP $20.00
Tribal rhythms, other-worldly voices, odd sounds such as bullfrog and car horn from 1987. Cover art by Damian Bisciglia.