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.
Text Sound Snowflakes
(Sham Repro) CDR $7.25
One side of the sound poetry / musique concrete album Text Sound Compositions (Fylkingen 1978) by the Swedish experimental poet and composer at the same time as one side of the Japanese synth-player’s electronic-arrangements-of-Debussy album Snowflakes Are Dancing (RCA Red Seal 1974). Straight through with no manipulation.
Slow Lightning
(Sham Repro) LP $20.00
Sometimes the old hands tell the truth. Cherry made it known some years ago that the cosmic hummus resonates. Bound by bread and blub, High Wycombe Wullie (Harrison) and The Guildford Grouch (Murphy) took to Roedale Valley allotments some years back to sow the seeds for Slow Lightning, which is neither a split nor a collab, but rather a love letter forged between close pals of the sonic ital. Let the lion’s gaze turn the weeds to stone! Harrison shows his delicate hand with thin precision loops and strange little snapshots. Scuttering gadgets wheeze ominous scents into the faces of yelping robotic kittens and the dictaphone player in your mind just keeps intoning “let the low tide tingle, fella!” Murphy proves he is no recycled revenant with a brave and bold bowl of text-sound tit pickle. Huff the high fidelity and let tribute be paid to those voices as they have teachings. The loops and the breaks keep it simmering nice, while flabbergasted turntables press cheeks with prime Bohman-esque yabber. Like Don probably never said “Let the duck honk rasp yr brain, man!”