Thursday, November 01, 2007

Another Creel-worthy obscurity--Nicolas Schoffer's Hommage A Bartok. I scooped this 1979 album on the Hungaroton label up a few months back because it looked so odd, plus it was only 8 bucks. The sleevenotes suggested he was actually some kind of visual artist attempting to translate his plastic arts oriented theories about color and structure and space into sound, or in his words, "to construct trapped time--in the same way as trapped space or trapped light information." The austere pulses and pure poised tones of pieces like "Chronosonor 5" do seem to be striving for a kind of stasis, they're not so much music as sonic mobiles hanging there in space.
Imagine Disco 3000 if Sun Ra had been lobotomized, or a Martin Rev solo album recorded in a K-hole.

In semi-related news, Tasmin was recently gifted with a new doll and for some reason she decided to call it Nono. So all that early exposure to La Fabbricia Illuminata and Non consumiamo Marx had an effect!