reviews (pre-2003)
Review of The Four Hundred Boys from Erasing Clouds
Silence, static, grumblings, buzzings, whirring, people speaking…these are some of the myriad sounds that make up The Four Hundred Boys, a collection of seven pieces, recorded between 1995 and 2000, by Seattle-based sound artist Alex Keller. Manipulating sounds in all sorts of ways which will not be easily understood by listeners (but are detailed in the linter notes for those with a need to comprehend what's going on technically), Keller creates sonic art which is complicated in the best way–meaning it is difficult in the way that gets your brain moving in various directions, not in the way that means what's going on is too abstract to enjoy. While not filled with surface-level aesthetic pleasures of the empty sort that people listen to top-40 radio for, these pieces are layered with unique sounds and juxtapositions of sounds. The opening track, “And the walls became the world all around,” delivers an intermittent but creeping wave of sound, at times metallic, at times electronic, at times almost nonexistent but not. The second, “Decades II,” uses something like a chime or a gong in the background and a squirming buzz/siren in the front. Both increase in loudness, unity and pitch until they collide like a train; then the track cuts to ancient-sounding tones and eerie silence, feeling like the spooky aftermath of something (with metallic ghosts lurking). From there the track continues to build like a cloud in different ways, with various sorts of clanging going on. All of these pieces can be appreciated on numerous levels. “Decades II,” for example, is awe-inspiring in one way while listening the first time, and in a completely different way after reading in the liner notes that it was an exploration of the sounds that can come from an electric guitar. That multiplicity in listener reaction is part of the appeal of these pieces; another is simply the mystery which lies behind such a breadth of sound. From “Landscape: Still Life With Bug Lamp,” an ambient track with a consistent buzzing sound, to “Gun,” a cut-up story where someone is speaking but nothing makes any logical sense, Keller relies on all sorts of techniques. Each technique, and each track, has a different background and sounds different from the next, yet each has the effect of getting listeners to try to figure it out on their own. Art which will likely mean something different for each listener, The Four Hundred Boys shines with a striking intricacy which should please listeners looking for something to intrigue, mystify and challenge them. David Heaton
Review of The Four Hundred Boys from Vital Weekly week 39 number 292
Alex Keller lives in Seattle, and releases his first solo CD. Besides he is a member of Rebreather, an improvisational unit with Christopher DeLaurenti. Not that I ever heard their music… Improvisation is not something Alex is doing on his solo CD. Each track is described on the sleeve in terms of intention and what he has done to create it. One piece just uses guitar sounds, in order to create a serious piece of electronic music, another uses piano sounds (the title piece, which unfortunately is not a great piece, as it's dabbling too much in the academic world but with lesser power) or field recordings. Keller's music work best if he works with stretched out, drone like sounds, with small events happening under the surface, such as in ‘Landscape: Still Life With Bug' or ‘Cosmetic'. They too are the result of sturdy processing and examining the ideas of the serious avant-garde, but at the same time result in a music that will appeal to the underground. Overall a very fine CD. Fraans DeWaard
Review of The Four Hundred Boys from Unlock Austin
Alex Keller's The Four Hundred Boys represents some of the very best sound artistry of the decade. Each of the seven pieces is a distinctive composition with a unique and empyrean element of genius. The diversity of the techniques, instruments and technologies used, and the composers mastery of them makes for engrossing, entertaining and intellectually-challenging listening.It is overall a very impressive disc, and one I will be listening closely to for a long time.
Review of The Four Hundred Boys from IEM Webzine
A new name for me in the experimental music, with debut album – an always interesting
and breathtaking experience. Alex Keller is Seattle based composer who has a kind of
academic music education and worked with Christopher DeLaurenti. Intrinsically atonal
fragments like the back side of the artificial, technological music around us, its
contrast with the harmony between sound and silence in the quiet parts, careful
collection of dissonantly sound events which are impossible to hear in half-ear (as much
as you can't escape the sense of reality of definite sounding objects when feel its
presence aurally) – to follow my description, you should imagine works in musique
concrete and other abstract styles of composition. Seven pieces, mostly pretty long by
duration, partly hypnotize listener with the dreamlike evolving, and partly disturb with
their uncontrolled and constantly changing, breaking basis. Every piece demonstrate the
perfect skills in the field recordings technique, computer software & processing,
electronic treatment of acoustic instruments like piano and guitar, rhythms and even
spoken word. I can't say that this album leave some sort of radical impression – it's
quite typical for experimental music school, as much as appealing for the mass-culture
consumers. And that's also the main reason for which I can recommend it to somebody who
will be interested.
Dmitry Vasilyev
Review (in correspondence) of The Four Hundred Boys from Prisms
It's a damned good album. You really have your own voice, and you also managed to crack
through a particular bias of mine. Allow me to explain briefly. As far as electronic and
collage-oriented works go I have a tendency to avoid ones that claim they will recreate
the dynamics of narrative (as when you say, re: The Four Hundred Boys itself: “My
intention… was to use layers of creative translation… to achieve some of the narrative
richness and dischord that the text had”). It's not that this isn't a very laudable goal
(I'm somewhat influenced by Susanne Langer, incidentally), and I *do* think such objects
*can* be crafted, but many who try to do so, simply fail. Pieces which so aspire may
turn out to be nice, and even generally worth listening to, but for all that they often
don't quite achieve what we might call a truly narrative texture. Indeed I resisted
listening to your album for a day or so, I think because I feared disappointment. But I
shouldn't have worried, as you actually seem to be able to do what needs to be done.
Interestingly enough, the piece in which your own voice seems least clear is in
Cosmetic: I like that piece, but perhaps because it was composed as a soundtrack, there
is some clash between your voice and Mr. Authement's. However, The Four Hundred
Boys worked exceedingly well, both in living up to its stated goal as well
as in instantiating (what seemed to me to be) your own voice as a composer, and since it
too is inspired (effectively) by a scenario, my hypothesis may be in error; and at that
point I draw a blank on further analytic insights for now.
Anyway, little of that really matters. It's a fine album, I hope it finds its audience
upon release…
I
ain Edgewater
Review of The Four Hundred Boys from Ampersand Etcetera
This is Keller's first album, combining pieces composed between 1995 and 2000. He was
educated in music theory at Huston, and his theoretical background is evident in the
extensive liner notes and the methods and objectives they outline. And I love liner
notes: I think it is great sometimes to get an angle on what the composer is intending –
the Sound Drifting set is great for that too. And it also helps to place Keller in an
electroacoustic part of my mind – it can be quite confusing if you put on what you
expect to be drifting ambient and out comes gestural precision.
On ‘And the walls became the world around us' he uses a ‘limited sound palette' – a
rising and falling tone, squealy buzzing noise, organ tones, pops and crackles – and
creates a subtle, quiet sound world that lives in the silences between sounds and the
solo and overlapped components. Quite restrained compared to ‘Decades II', an
exploration of the guitar sound, which shifts dramatically between noisy buzzing tones,
gentle shimmers, rhythmic choppy mechanical edgy parts and more as we swing between
recognisable guitar and more treated and bent versions.
The title work is a strange conceptual piece, written by taking a piano part and playing
it backwards, modulating it, rewriting and more: the reality is a fascinating twisted
tonality of odd notes in unexpected progressions, electronic hummings and pulsing
scrapes and scratches which is oddly entrancing – and has some affinity with ‘Decades
II' in its tonality. A more sensuous mood envelops ‘Landscape: still life with bug
lamp', which is constructed from 12 layers, and for the listener is a shifting
soundscape of deep resonances, shimmering chimes and bells, much closer to ambience.
The long ‘Cosmetic (soundtrack)' encapsulates and extends the album: it is a sequence of
short segments, all created on the computer, which span a continent of moods: quite
gentle tonal works; mechanical industrial rhythms with descending notes; cut up and
sequestered voices, probably from television; edgy harsh buzzing and squeals; and more.
A searching demanding piece which is quite intriguing. Which segues well into ‘All of
these things' which is intriguing in different ways: created from field recordings both
natural and in an echoing bunker, together with read texts, Keller processed them in a
variety of ways – stretching, convolution and more – and has created a soundscape which
hovers at the edge of familiarity, sounds which are almost comprehensible, shivering and
swaying at the edge of our auditory cortex. And the final disorientation – ‘Gun' in
which a text of a dream is read, but the text was previously put through some cut-up
techniques, and again, reality seems just a confused thought process away: almost
understandable, a powerful conclusion.
My experience with musiqueconcrete/electroacoustic is not broad, so I can't say how this
album fits within the genre: but I can say that I find it intriguing, entertaining and
stimulating, in the same way the Empreintes Digitales disks I looked at a few issues ago
were. If you enjoy music composed and constructed in this way, I think that this album
would appeal.
Jeremy Keens
Review of The Four Hundred Boys from AmbiEntrance
Alex Keller is serious about his sonic manipulations, presenting several pieces he's
devised over the past few years. The disc opens on And the walls became the world all
around; the title comes from a quote from “Where the Wild Things Are” and the bizarrely
droning/sputtering sonic mutations are created/processed in MetaSynth. Based on ancient
Mayan Popul Vuh, the fifteen-minute title track involves multi-reversed piano phrases
(though you'd never know it) in its start and stop tonal blurts. Ringing tones swelter
around Landscape: still life with bug lamp (3:46), a smeary layered blur dating back to
1995. Spastically exploding with media-samples and static, Cosmetic (soundtrack) (19:54)
changes gears several times… to big rippling soundwaves, then squealing streams of
starkly wavering scree, then to murky beats, Space-Invader bleeps, thunderous assaults
and more. Less-aggressive All of these things is often quietly percolating with unknown
organic activities and muffled voices. The closing piece, Gun, features a fragmented
spoken dream recollection. Though the intent of Keller's experimentations aren't always
clear, the results are always unpredictable.
David J. Opdyke
Review of The Four Hundred Boys from Incursion.org
This CD brings together seven electroacoustic pieces created over the past six years by
Alex Keller, a man whose fascination with the omnipresence of sound as artifice has led
to his interest in sound design and difficult music. Each of these pieces tells a
different story, and is constructed with different methods and sound material. Keller
describes his intentions and methods for each piece in the liner notes, and this is
where you get the sense that he is a real enthusiast for experimenting with sound. The
first, “And the walls became the world all around”, uses a limited number of sounds from
a soft synth, later treated with effects and then assembled in ProTools. The second
piece uses the sound of an electric guitar; the third, a piano. Others use field
recordings, samplers, and soft synths, all put through the wheels of various effects and
cut-up techniques. Some of these pieces are wonderful; they exhibit coherent and
inspiring sound worlds filled with rich textures and captivating sounds. For example,
the harmonic drones which coast through the short piece “Landscape: still life with bug
lamp” occupy an impressive dynamic. Also, the field recordings and vocal manipulations
in “All of these things” form one of the strongest pieces on the CD. Others might feel a
little fragmented in places (parts of “Cosmetic”, for example, feel a little crowded
with ideas and transitions), but always with an impressive presence of carefully
structured sounds. An ambitious collection that surely makes for difficult listening,
but will also reward the careful listener. Nicely done.
Richard di Santo
Review of The Phonographers Union: Live on Sonarchy Radio from the All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com
More free-form and easy-flowing than musique concrte, much more concrete than
experimental electronica, this music speaks to the mind and the soul, as some of these
sounds are very familiar, but their combinations evoke surreal situations. Since there
are too many details, too many events to possibly absorb and remember everything in one
sitting, each listen provides a different experience. And even people usually closed to
avant-garde music will be able to sense the poetry and the immediacy of this album.
Highly recommended as a key statement in the development of “field recording” or
“phonography” as a form of sound art.
Franois Couture
Review of The Phonographers Union: Live on Sonarchy Radio from Grooves
Of the nine musicians involved with the Phonographers Union, I¹m onlyfamiliar with
Christopher DeLaurenti, who¹s best known for his drifting darkambient work. This
recording, however, has very little to do withDeLaurenti¹s usual music, though even with
so many players involved, thislive radio session hardly sounds more cluttered than his
sparse electronics.Instead, the sound field is lightly splattered with hints of guitar
(bothlightly strummed or scraped to make a harsher creaking noise), sampled
fieldrecordings, clattering percussion, and electronic tones. Apparently,everything
comes from recordings, both manipulated and untouched, anensemble of record players and
sound recorders speaking to one anotherthrough the voices and sounds of others. All of
it combines in a driftingcollage that¹s surprisingly seamless and is also completely
egoless – evenfor those familiar with all nine musicians, I doubt anyone could pick
outindividual contributions from this sea of noises and gentle sounds. Voices harmonize
delicately in the distant background, water rustleslightly over a country creekbed, and
somewhere a cock crows good morningrepeatedly. This rustic impression is echoed in the
rattling of metallicobjects and soft scrapes, evoking a farmer going about his daily
chores.It all sounds very naturalistic, like eavesdropping on a private scenerather than
listening to an improvised (and broadcast) performance. Thisgroup, more than most field
recordists, seems particularly interested inusing recordings as a vehicle for
improvisation. Rather than creating theirown sounds in real time to blend with the
contributions of the others, thesemusicians are placing pre-recorded sounds into the
constantly shiftingcontexts created by their peers. Each new addition subtly shifts
theongoing dialogue, taking it to new places as the layers add up to a powerfuland
cohesive whole.
Ed Howard, Grooves
Review of The Phonographers Union: Live on Sonarchy Radio from The Wire, http://thewire.co.uk/
“Presented in its entirety, their set on Sonarchy Radio, a weekly hour-long show devoted
to new music…is a work of gentle concentration. The resultant interplay between the
various ‘captures' displays an agreeable subtlety and sensitivity in its shifts of focus
and range. Impossible to reduce to any kind of linear development or narrative, it
reveals a bustling acoustic realm existing just outside our senses that deserves to be
attended to.“
Ken Hollings
Review of The Phonographers Union: Live on Sonarchy Radio from Electric Current, Ann Arbor http://www.ecurrent.com/art/musrev0604.php
The Phonographers UnionLive on Sonarchy RadioAccretions (2004)accretions.com,
phonography.org In their natural habitat, sounds have a context. An atmosphere, a sonic
landscape, and a relation to objects and events within a space. The Phonographers Union,
nine “field recorders,” capture and reproduce these sounds, like a game of sonic
catch-and-release.Live on Sonarchy Radio is a collection of this zoo, played back
through laptops and minidiscs, without any effects or adornment. The result is
captivating, evocative and surreal without being insistent or forced. Dripping water
overlays Buddhist chanting along with dogs breathing and cocks crowing, spring peepers
play against an Asian market, and drains burble under jet plane screams, all without any
sense of intended meaning in the juxtapositions. There isn't the sense that any of these
environments are constructed by foley artists, and it's mixed well enough to avoid the
New Age white-noise label. These tracks become the subtlest suggestions of surrealist
narratives, and are more interesting as background noise than as something to actively
tune in. Divided into two parts (which are, in turn, made up of several tracks), Live on
Sonarchy Radio moves slowly from more concrete and obviously musical noises (like the
subway car chugging by) and into sounds that are less and less representational and more
and more colored by their lack of context. Even words and conversations are both so
distant and so incoherent as to turn into texture over meaning, giving the sense of
being somewhere else without knowing where that is, exactly.
Josh Steichmann
Review of The Phonographers Union: Live on Sonarchy Radio from Accretions, http://www.accretions.com
Every recording I've heard that Doug Haire was involved in brings new meaning to
“different”. He& Marcos Fernandes (who is part of the Union) have captured an
exquisitely revealing listen to the works of 9 field recordists. It is an amazing sonicj
ourney, & improvised in the finest traditions of freedom. If you walked inon this bunch
in th' Jackstraw Studio, you probably wouldn't have the foggiest as to what was going
on… it's when the collective sonicexperience hits your ears that you know you've been
exposed to something that's sonically “down under”. If you're stuck in 3-chord listening
mode, &have been forever, you probably won't find much to attract you here, but if your
mind knows that there is something more to listening than AM radio all day – GET THIS!
I've been involved in a few such projects myself, but never on the grand scale that
these folks approach, & the recording captures it flawlessly! This gets a MOST HIGHLY
RECOMMENDED for people not afraid to listen to new adventures. VERY interesting.
Rotcod Zzaj
Review of The Phonographers Union: Live on Sonarchy Radio from Butterfly Webzine,
http://butterfly-zine.com/HTML%20Explorer/Phonographers-Union–Live-On-Sonarchy-Radio–N.htm
This review is in Greek! FYI. I'm only posting the link for that reason.
Review of The Phonographers Union: Live on Sonarchy Radio from Ragazzi,
http://www.ragazzi-music.de/phonographer.html
And this one is in German.
Review of The Phonographers Union: Live on Sonarchy Radio from Metamorphic Journeyman, was athttp://metajour.50megs.com/reviews/phonogra/sonarchy/review.htm but now apparently offline.
This collaboration / compilation consists of field recordings by folk whomay or may not
be familiar to you – MARCOS FERNANDES, MARK GRISWOLD, STEVE BARSOTTI, CHRISTOPHER
DeLAURENTI, ALEX KELLER, DALE LLOYD, PERRI LYNCH, ROBERT MILLIS and TOBY PADDOCK. Each
piece is constructed from various found sound sources – mainly recorded in public places
such as busy streets, parks, railway stations and open areas throbbing with the myriad
goings on of everyday human activity. Some recording are more obscure – the ambient
dullness of a dripping tap in an enclosed space, for instance. Nature also contributes,
with birdsong and cicadas, juxtapositioned beside, or rather against, a more Industrial,
mechanical sound. Many of the sounds here sound processed and manipulated, and there's
even trace elements of musical instruments at the opening end, although these sounds are
mostly tuneless,forced into patterns whereby they might be mistaken for ‘composed' or
‘deliberate' by the contributors themselves. They add a fair bit of studio process to
the tapes – treatments and enhancements without removing the bright essential life from
them.So, does it work?Well, I'd say it's kinda hit and miss, and while I enjoy the slice
of sonic world they have captured and brought clinically into the walls of my home, I
find that often it's too random to really get the juices flowing, and as complicated and
multilayered as they have made it, it's probably as difficult to listen to as to compose
(so many variables to make such a pure ambient music into what we nowadays perceive as
‘Ambient')But when it does work, it can chill the air – disembodied voices small-talking
about very little may not seem too strange when you happen upon them when walking down
the street, but captured forever against an on-judgemental shifting background they are
focused into something no longer innocent or instant – caught like holograms, moving so
slightly, or frozen in, yet out of time, they become immortalised trivia, a momentary
glimpse into the lives of the most dangerous creature on the planet. And when you hear
the voices of children it always seems somehow they have, if not been robbed of their
innocence, then certainly they have had it put outon public display. And the
multilayering gives it an ever-changing sound -sometimes seeming like Industrial
Ambience.This is DUCHAMP territory – found sounds are readymades, no matter how much
work goes into cleaning them up. What these guys do, they do well, although approach
with caution – it may not be to everyone's taste.
Antony Burnham
Review of The Phonographers Union: Live on Sonarchy Radio from Signal to Noiseissue 35 Fall 2004, page 79
Live on Sonarchy Radio documents two long improvisations (divided into 8 tracks), when 8
members of the Seattle-based Phonographers Union got together with Marcos Fernandes;
everyone whipped out their CD and mp3 players – plus one laptop – and threw down their
found sounds. Doug Haire did an excellent job engineering the live mix: every sound
source appears and disappears with finesse, allowing our listening mind to follow the
conjunctive trail of ideas and sounds without any intrusions of hard, unbalanced
signals. I love hearing so many people improvise using nothing but the best samples of
what they've collected from the-world-as-it-exists-through-microphones. Sure, some of
the sounds are things you can easily identify and would even be likely to suspect to
crop up on a document like this – footsteps, kids in a park, birds, rain, etc. – but the
force of this recording depends on the deft composite created by these kinds of sounds
blended into a tapestry with more ambiguous! ones.Oscillating rhythms of grainy bug
swarms, warped rubber gongs, someone's dance class, matches striking, mothers chatting,
saw blades sharpening, murmurs, luminous fly-zapping machines, basketball gymnasium
confrontations, rural weather, carnival-barking church bell tolling toilet bowl gurgling
train station dock rumbling: the stories are there if you've got the imagination to make
them. Otherwise, the sounds themselves do a fine job affirming their powerful
polysignificance in our lives.
Andrew Choate
Review of The Phonographers Union: Live on Sonarchy Radio from Q: The Ultimate Rock and Roll MagazineI haven't actually seen this one; it was sent to me in an e-mail. Apparently we received three stars, the same as the (then) new Cure album.
The sound of the suburbs – quite literally.Somewhere between the jazz-rock
experimentalism of Radiohead and the sort of art installations that so upset Daily Mail
leader writers at Turner Prize time, you'll find Seattle's Phonographers Union. This
album is a radio broadcast of a live mix made out of the nine-strong team's MiniDisc and
DAT field recordings. Rain pours down, a dog barks, a child's crying is looped into a
Public Enemy-style screaming motif: it has the quality of music, but is sounds like
sitting in a park. One of them even claims to have recorded a tree singing. Such
ludicrous ambition can only be admired.
Angus Batey
Review of The Phonographers Union: Live on Sonarchy Radio from Vital Weekly
With a name such as The Phonographers Union, I am bound to think of theSonic Arts Union.
In the sixties this was a group of composers who playedlive electronic music and
included Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucierand David Behrman. With The
Phonographers Union I sort of see the samething: this large group of people, nine in
total, all armed with theirmini-discs, CD players and even a laptop, plugging these into
the mixingboard and making this giant sound collage of field recordings. The
fieldrecordings are not in any way processed or altered, but just a little bit
offiltering and EQ-ing. It seems to me that the majority of these people isinterested in
the ‘social' aspect of soundscaping. Apart from the beginning,where we hear animal
calls, there is a great deal of people talking (thoughmost of the time not to be
understood what they say) and other signs ofhuman activity. The sound is a bit dull at
times, I must say as there aremany things happening at various levels all the time, but
due to the bitmuddy mix it's hard to make a good seperation. Maybe it would have been
abetter idea (but probably not conceptually right) to put all nine players ona
multi-track tape (computer) and do a sort of mix afterwards, thus bringingin sharper
edges to the material and make it less of a continuos flow.Players include: Steve
Barsotti, Christopher DeLaurenti, Marcos Fernandes,Mark Griswold, Alex Keller, Dale
Lloyd, Perri Lynch, Robert Millis and TobyPaddock. Many of these people have solo
recordings with field recordings, soif you like this (and despite my comments, there is
no reason why youshouldn't be interested in hearing this, since it's not bad at all), a
worldof field recordings will open up for you.
Frans DeWaard
Review of Searching for the Inverse Square from Vital Weekly, week 12 number 415
Music from Meri von Kleinsmid and Alex Keller have been reviewed before (343 and 292
resp.) but those were solo projects. Here the two offer a CD of four concerts they
recorded together, in which they loosely improvise with toys, radios and bent-circuits.
Important however is that they are moving through the space in which they perform. The
four recordings here are all done using a microphone (but I'm sure can never capture the
event if you didn't witness them). In the opening piece ‘Phar Lap' they move about using
a modified Texas Instruments ‘speak ‘n math' and five toy parrots recording it while
moving through the space. This is I think the best piece of the CD and would have loved
to seen this live (maybe a DVD in the future). The other three tracks are twice as long
as ‘Phar Lap' and unfortunally can't capture my attention through out. The distorted
radio waves and amplified toys take a lot of time and do not necessarily go anywhere.
Here the lack of visuals is most sad, because it would have made more sense.
Frans DeWaard
Review of Searching for the Inverse Square from Igloo Magazine, http://www.igloomag.com/document.php?task=printview&id=694&category=reviews%5C%22
And they're off with the familiar start for “Phar Lap.” Recorded live at Vital 5 Gallery
in Seattle, musician/educator/curator Alex Keller and composer Meri von KleinSmid team
up to create something eloquent and off-putting. By modifying electronic toys, these two
have truly affected the sound effects of a racetrack circa 2010, when all live action
will be replaced by free-form animation. With the radio dial spinning, a family is
caught while playing hide-n-seek in and around a Seattle gas tank. These unintended
collaborators make for a foil to the serious toll of AM radio preaching of illiteracy,
AIDS and all things Driving Miss Daisy. DATs and mics gone wild! Actually, this is quite
grounded, but the radio broadcasts do get to me, even as a creative AM (ab)user myself.
But in these nineteen minutes the family's laughter just winds through frugally as the
echoes of the static frequencies serve as the base. I recommend that Keller and
KleinSmid attend a Negativland show near them, they are “almost” there on this track, it
just lacks the inherent humor in the tongue-in-cheek self-appointed authoritarian
language of the media. More like a radio-thon, “The Best Station Is No Station”
certainly makes it point self-evident. The knob-centric “Focused on the Conflict at
Hand” finds them in the basement of a local Community College sampling the resident
Ataris. So let the games begin as the track captures the tempo of excitement. It's great
to hear these old-fashioned gaming sounds, where you would certainly mistake them for
perhaps the warp of say, a Theremin. “Message from Bunker 23” is aided in part by its
outdoor surroundings with geese and other flying craft, mixed with found cassette starts
and stops atop Magnuson Park in Seattle. The voiceovers discussing prostate cancer
prevention and disease are contorted through crude physical manipulations. A dada threat
is made loud, and unclear. In its ambiguity, the end result of “”Searching for the
Inverse Square” is something that would make Kurt Schwitters smile a mile.
TJ Norris
Review of Searching for the Inverse Square from Gaz-ETA, numer 33 – LIPIEC 2005 http://www.gaz-eta.vivo.pl/gaz-eta/recenzje/gazeta.php?nr=33&id=s_9
Humming. Hisses. Scratches. Radios cutting in and out. It's all part and parcel of Meri
von KleinSmid's work. Some call it experimental brilliance. I'll just state for the
record that it's simply stunning.
The duo of Alex Keller and Meri von KleinSmid is one that is equally quirky as it is
wonderfully adventurous. ‘Searching for the Inverse Square' is a compilation of
sorts, bringing together some of the duo's most recent works.
Most of their music is made with use of simple machines ' DATs, condenser microphones,
Minidisc, cassette players. The sounds on this disc are simply put eerie, and rightly
so, having been recorded in basement and an old gas plant. My favourite piece is
‘Focused on the conflict at hand', which turns out to be a calling card for old Atari
game consoles. Both musicians use old Atari 1200 XL and 2600 systems as sources so we
get a lot of blinks, oinks, pops and all around, this is just a fun piece. Another great
experiment is ‘The best station is no station', where two battery-operated radios are
manipulated [basically, the dial is swung from right to left ' as we hear short snippets
of voices along with lots of static] and a family that just happened to be at the
recording location [an old unused gas plant] plays hide-and-go-seek. Voices of various
family members yelling at the top of their voices as they're found are interspersed with
the voices originating from the radios and at times you're guessing, which is which.
Tom Sekowski