TheeAnnoying – Composition I
This is the debut CD release from TheeAnnoying. Composition I is a bold and expressive statement of sounds designed to push the envelope of what it means to play rock music in an age where information overload and deep chaos reigns supreme. The group sums it all up by paraphrasing Baudrillard: “power in the future will be for those who know they have no nation, no home.”
Ten Ticklish Ants – guitar, vocals , M. Mersereau – bass, vocals, samples , D.A. Leech – percussion
Brains – Gristle and Skins
Consisting of a left half known as Drew Ceccato (winds) and right half that answers to Chris Golinski (percussion), Brains plays improvised music meant to stir aggressive thought and provoke anything but indifferent emotional responses. Waves of energy guide daring listeners through a multitude of different sonic space-scapes that encompass influences from modern improvisational music and throw-back 70′s free-jazz. These two musical astronauts have a lot to say. Brains is good, Brains is bad, Brains is something we all have.
Drew Ceccato – winds, Chris Golinski – percussion
duo B. – start this before dawn touches the skyscrapers
The music on this record is a drawing, a photograph, a map, a scribble, a film, a collage. It is also one ensemble’s love letter to the San Francisco Bay Area creative music community – a place where a duo of modest means can commission a composer friend with the promise of a burrito and a performance of the work. Where improvisers and composers comingle, collaborations across disciplines are commonplace, and where so many musicians have deep connections to visual art and film. Though graphic notation has a long history in contemporary music, on the West Coast and in the Bay Area in particular, a handful of composer/improvisers have been developing highly personalized visual languages for sound for some time. Here, a beautiful collage, a crayon city map, a fragmented photo or a scribbled and scratched line drawing can evoke and proscribe rhythmic relationships, layers of density, counterpoint, texture, dynamics. start this before dawn touches the skyscrapers is the result of duo B.’s idiosyncratic, slightly obsessive processing, rehearsing, de- and re-constructing of compositions by some of their favorite San Francisco Bay Area composers working with visual scores. Some of the music was composed especially for the ensemble (Bennett, Greenlief, Frasch); other pieces they requested access to (Raskin) after hearing inspiring versions by other ensembles. The record’s title is drawn from the instructions on Phillip Greenlief’s map-based score Tokyo.
Anaerobe – Permanent Underground
4-CD Set
Anaerobe’s Permanent Underground, a New United Media product, is a four-part, four-hour epic that straddles the line between sound and silence and plumbs the depths of the barely audible rumble that lies beneath the electronically reproduced sound that permeates the post-industrial landscape of early 21st-century America. Recorded sound is all around us, but what is the sound of electric recording itself? What is the sound of the structural underpinning of the electronically reproduced sound that we so often take for granted? Does this underpinning exist? Is it real or imaginary? Regardless, Permanent Underground attempts to capture what it is, could be, or might be, and the result is both subtle and massive, both barely noticeable and inescapable. This is the sound that lies below sound. It is hard to say where it began, and it seems to have no end. To listen to it in its entirety is to heighten one’s own sensitivity to and awareness of the foundation of recorded sound, and deepen one’s appreciation of all sound, whether recorded or live. Duncan Calvin Dobson, III – turntables, electronics
