Thomas Leer and Robert Rental - The Bridge

The classic theme of the story of electronic music in Britain is told is one of an amazing synchronicity. In different cities, different people, with different influences, were playing with machines that could make music.
Bravely, these pioneers were turning their backs on the macho posturing of guitars and drums, and were diving headfirst into the world of noises that owed nothing to the acoustic world.
Taking the DIY aesthetics of punk, so the story goes, and melding it to avant garde machines, these trail blazers took their strange noises and made them public and accessible. It was, so it seemed, only a hop skip and a jump from The Normal's Warm Leatherette to The Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams.
Maybe.
Of course, in any history, there are always more continuities than clean breaks. Things always, whether you want them to or not, have antecedents, influences, forebears. Punk didn't rid the world of pompous rock stars, and it certainly didn't invent rebellion or independence. It just seemed like it.
This wonderful, emotive and captivating record has elements of Brian Eno and Bowie, of the electronic side of Krautrock such as Tangerine Dream or Manuel Gottsching, of the Radiophonic Workshop but also of early PiL, of the dark brooding proto-goth of early Bauhaus and of course of Throbbing Gristle. It an amazing concoction.
Thomas Leer and Robert Rental were both from Edinburgh and came down to London to pursue their musical ambitions.
Releasing Private Plane (Leer's first single) and Paralysis (Rental's first single) on their own labels they found that they were in the company of other electronic musicians such as Cabaret Voltaire, the Human League and Daniel Miller's The Normal. Listen to some of them here.

 Leer would go on to attack the pop world, producing some lovely, but largely overlooked music. Rental, unfortunately died in 2000 having only released two singles, a one sided live album recorded with Daniel Miller and this collaboration.

On one level it is possible to enjoy this record simply for the variety of unusual sounds and noises it contains. Although synthesisers played a pivotal role in the music, they were much less sophisticated than current ones. Sounds were harder to produce and harder to reproduce. To my ears, these limitations can be heard on The Bridge, as can the efforts of Rental and Leer to overcome them. The first track on side 2, Interferon, starts with a noise that sounds like the wind whipping against a tall tower block, or an electronic machine gone wrong, or the half-heard noise of a massive city. I find that very exciting.

Added to these electronically produced noises, the pair provided pecussion by hitting objects to produce drum sounds they liked, and, as the sleeve notes say, "All blips, clicks & unseemly noises were generated by refrigerators & other domestic appliances & are intrinsic to the music". This was the soundscape of Eno's Ambient records taken to its logical conclusion. Not only were 'normal' objects used to make music but 'normal' noises became music. Leer and Renal were acting as 'the bridge' between the sounds of the everyday and the sounds of music. In effect making the everyday into the unusual.

Unlike many of Eno's ambient records of this period, the everyday sounds used by Leer and Rental were defiantly urban sounds. They aren't pretty or sweet but are hard edged and utilitarian. One might say they are industrial, although that might make you think that the music is hard and abrasive and meant to shock in the way of label mates (and the people who lent them the equipment) Throbbing Gristle. Although, at times, The Bridge does feel as though it might be a Chris and Cosey record there is something defiantly different in its sound and approach.

The use of strange noises, and of found sounds, has some pretty clear antecedents in the world of pop. The 1950's particularly saw the exploration of the boundaries of sound as musicians used everyday tools to create sounds, such as on Jack Fascinato's Music From A Surplus Store, which uses only builders tools to create a 'now sound' record, or Joe Meek's famous studio trickery, heard to the best effect in his I Hear A New World (which is just a crazy, crazy record and I can't recommend it enough to people who like strange sounds).

What makes this record different, and indeed, The Normal and Throbbing Gristle,

is that they are very serious. There are no frivolous or throw-away aspects to The Bridge. To me, this record reflects a very monochrome, hard, decaying, faded, city, not a New World, or even an amusing way to reconfigure the existing world, It is a reflection of the realities of the urban experience. Unlike music made with the traditional guitar, bass, drums, singer configuration, Rental and Leer, were able to conjure up not just the emotions that they felt through being in the city but the very sounds of the city itself.

The cover shows a dark brooding picture of the Thames looking from Chelsea across to Battersea. Battersea Bridge, a late Victorian structure that looks as through it was designed by a cake maker, is lit up giving it a further unreal quality. Ironically, it was designed by Sir  Joseph Bazalgette who also created London's sewerage network - a case of both low and high architecture!

Indeed the record itself is split, with Side 1 being more song-based, with guitars and vocals, and Side 2 being more filmic, with washes of sounds, atmospheric pauses, tension and drama. I can't help thinking that in its construction it is very like Bowie's Low in this regard - and Heroes as well in its use of noise and sound.

The whole record needs to be listened to in one sitting, rather than taken as individual tracks. Only in this way can the full emotional impact of the music properly be felt. I'm not sure if listening to it on CD would be the same experience. For me, getting up and turning the record over, perfectly marks the two sides, the dichotomy, the duality of the music. Two sides that are spanned by a bridge.

PAT PRILLY - MOOG SUONO DEL DOMANI - CANOPO 12

During a recent trip to Paris I found this in a dodgy shop on Montmatre. Amidst scratched Blue Notes and overpriceds 80s 'wave', nestled this record.
It had to be mine!
As we all know Pat Prilly was a pseudonym for Jean Jacques Perry.
This music is the sound of the future - or at least the future from the perspective of 1972.
For some reason it reminds me of Zardoz, the film with Sean Connery wearing strange pants. I don't know why, as none of the music was used in the film, but that's just the weird way my mind works.


Here is the track list - and mouthwatering it it too:

Side A
1. Treno Sperimentale
2. Canali Di Marte
3. Misteri Del Cosmo
4. Irrealta
5. Musica Dell'Infinito
6. Vibrazioni Magnetiche
7. Viaggio Nell'Incoscio
8. Cardifonia

Side B
1. Uomo 2000
2. Il Nulla
3. Altitudine
4. Frontiere Dello Sconosciuto
5. Elettrosintesi
6. Mondo Del Futuro
7. Psycho

As the notes on "Questo disco che vi proponiamo non contiene alcuna musica tradizionale ed e stato interamente realizzato con sonorita di orgine elettronica utilzzando uno strumento rivoluzionario: il sintetizzatore Moog."

Listen for yourselves here

Apologies for the odd pops  - but that's what you get with vinyl!

SECESSION - A DARK ENCHANTMENT

In the pre-Internet age it was sometimes impossible to find out anything about a band.
When I was a teenager the only source of information on most bands was the NME. If you couldn't read about a band in the music press then there was no hope of finding out anything. No glossy monthly magazines, no newspaper coverage of pop music, no websites or itunes and of course with the likes of DLT and Kid Jensen ruling the Radio 1 airwaves you could be sure that you would only hear the charts. On reflection it's a small miracle that anyone knew anything about anything!
I simply cannot remember why I bought this record. I can remember the tiny record shop I bought it in. I can remember who I was with and what they bought. But why did I pick this record and not any others?
So let's pretend that we are in a world with no Wikipedia. How do you find out information about the bands you love? Well one way was to look at the sleeve. Really, really look at it. After all that was all you had. Unfortunately this sleeve doesn't give much away. The inner sleeve declares 'Songs About Love and Death'. The band mysteriously use initials instead of first names, although there are some band photos so I knew that one of the band was female.
Don't forget that A Dark Enchantment came out in 1987. I'd grown up with record sleeves that were so well designed that it sometime didn't matter what the record was like. Think Peter Saville and Factory, think The Smiths on Rough Trade, or 4AD.
So I get home and put the needle on the record.
This is a record with so many ideas that it can never settle on one thing.  It wants to be a happy sparkly kind of record but at the same time it wants to be a dark brooding angry record.
The inescapable comparison, which I thought the very first time I listened to it, is with New Order. But that is a good thing not a bad thing. Listen to Love Lies Bleeding and you'll hear a band that deserved to play for clubs full of spannered ravers.

Love Lies Bleeding is them at their happy dancefloor friendly best.
 And then they follow it up with something like Sneakyville, apparently inspired by the Manson killings and sounding something like Depeche Mode all deep voices and brooding synth lines.

The whole record is somewhat off-kilter. It flirts with so many styles, masters some and fails to get others right. The lyrics are, for the most part impenetrable. I can never seem to get on top of the music, or perhaps I mean under the skin of it. Just when I think I have Secession down, they slip out of my grasp and lead me on to somewhere else. For every moment of beauty on Ocean Blue there is the terrible sax solo on Radioland. For the wonderful synth sounds in The Magician there is the terrible guitar in the same song.

I loved that unknowable element to them. All I had was the music and even the music couldn't be pinned down.

I love the internet but sometime I feel that we have lost something too.

Of course now I can find out as much as the band as I want.
Here is what Wikipedia has to say. Does having the story of the band add to the music? Not for me, as I loved the music already even when the creators were faceless.
In a way it was this way of thinking that prepared me for my love affair with house music when I first heard it in 1988 - only a year after buying this record. It was the 'purity' of the music, untrammelled by images or human faces that I loved. Finding and falling for this record prepared me for that.


I've never met anyone else with this record and although I have now discovered that it only had a very small pressing, I like to think that there is a select band of lucky people who took a chance on something unknown and were rewarded.

MUSIC OF THE DEAD - SOUNDTRACKS TO ROMERO'S ZOMBIE MOVIES

From the title of this blog you could probably guess I was a Romero fan. I've loved his Zombie movies ever since I caught Day of the Dead on late night TV when I was far too young to be allowed to watch it. Which made it all the more thrilling!
I had never seen anything like it. The gore and blood were good, although I don't remember being too grossed out by them - perhaps it was a cut version. But it was the political message of the film that got me. Even as a small kid I could tell that this was an attack on consumer society - or shopping as I called it in those days. I can barely go to a shopping mall today without looking at all of the shopping zombies around me. I am, of course, not like them!
When I discovered that there were more films by the same director I was thrilled. What I didn't realise is that they were all so different. Of course, being different they also have very different soundtracks.
The soundtrack to 1968's Night of the Living Dead wasn't released until 1982. In part that was because the 'soundtrack' consisted of library cuts chosen by Romero from the Capitol Hi-Q Library.
When choosing the music he wanted, Romero made a deliberate effort to select music that he thought evoked earlier horror films. Whether deliberately or accidentally he chose tracks that had been previously used in The Hideous Sun Creature, Teenagers from Outer Space and Terror from the Year 5,000 (none of which I've seen!).
The use of library music, although undoubtedly financially motivated, unintentionally adds to the tension and in some places horror of the film. The music is 'familiar', it instantly evokes the kind of emotions that are expected. We have all heard this 'kind' of music before and, even if we don't consciously hear it our emotions are directed by it.
String driven and melodramatic, these tracks have, for me, moved beyond mere background music and now remind me of each scene. However, without the images of the zombies the music can in places be quite beautiful. I particularly like First Advance by Ib Glindemann for its imaginative use of heavy percussion and strings.
If you haven't seen the film, shame on you. And now is your chance to see it:-

Night of the Living Dead was such a success that it was inevitable that Romero should make a sequel, although he tried not to and made the not very successful romantic comedy There's Always Vanilla, the unsatisfactory Season of the Witch, the creepy Crazies and the even more creepy Martin before returning to the undead.
The story of the production of Dawn of the Dead is convoluted. You can read about it here.

One of the results of Romero's partnership with Italian film-maker Dario Argento was the use of the Italian prog rock band Goblin on the soundtrack. Goblin's first film score had been for the European cut of Romero's Martin.
Needless to say the music is much more modern than the 1950s cuts in the previous film. But then Dawn is also a more sophisticated film. Shot in colour, with a bigger budget and superior special effects the synthesisers and metronomic beat of the Goblin score provides the perfect accompaniment.
I love the space that each track has and the way that they develop slowly. The build of tense is achieved in much the same fashion as the earlier library tracks, but this time it is a synthesiser rather than a string section that produces the creepy effect.
Claudio Simonetti, keyboardist for Goblin went on to write disco and I think you can hear it in some of the funkier passages of the record.
Although, for me, the highlights are the electronic pieces there are also some, very strange, violin tracks which sound very unconvincing.
Just as there are many versions of the film there are many versions of the soundtrack, even a Japan only 45!
I am afraid to say that mine is the Dagored 2000 release.
In the end the Goblin music was only used in the Italian/ European release (which was cut in a different way too).
However, my version of the extended cut includes the Goblin music as well as the music used on the American release.
Again if you haven't seen the film then there must be something wrong with you:
Here it is:

The Goblin music was only part of the Dawn of the Dead soundtrack but until the nice people at  Trunk Records it was unavailable.

Terrible sleeve mind you. Doesn't it look slightly like Phil Seaman? Check for yourself here.

Just as he had done for Night of the Living Dead, Romero used library recording for his soundtrack to Dawn of the Dead. Using the De Wolfe Library this time Romero brought together a group of song with a completely different feel.
Gone are the 50s B-Movie horror strings and in their place is a mix of menacing synthesisers, some very avant garde sounding works and even some Radiophonics.
I tracks such as Cosmology Part 1 by Pierre Lemel are almost too difficult for me to listen to - although just for the sake of this blog I have done!
One of the 'highlights' of the record is The Gonk by Herbert Chappell. It appears at the end of the film as the zombies take over the mall and in particular as they walk across the ice skating rink. Personally I've never really liked it but others do.....
Figment by Simon Park on the other hand is a great bit of uptempo action music, not really horror more cop music.
Hats off once more to Romero for finding these perfect tracks.

Perhaps the experience of having Goblin score Dawn of the Dead influenced Romero but I suspect that the decision to involve John Harrison in the soundtrack was an attempt by t the studio to produce a marketable product. Some of the quirkiness of the library tracks has gone unfortunately.
That said I like this soundtrack very much indeed. The opening track The Dead Walk is almost disco. In a way this record reminds me of the music of John Carpenter, particularly his score for Assault on Precinct 13, particularly Breakdown which is fantastic.
The vocal numbers If Tomorrow Comes and The World Inside You Eyes, could, perhaps, have been left of the record but you can't have everything.
I was playing the side long The Dead Suite recently and my daughter asked me to take it off. "Its very scary music daddy," she said. And that is all you need to know about it.
If you've read down to here you have surely seen the film but if not here it is:

MINNY POPS - DRASTIC MEASURES, DRASTIC MOVEMENT

"Take that racket off! Its even worse than jazz!"
This was my wife's reaction to the Minny Pops' LP.
Indeed its hard to reply to this kind of response when the first track on the LP, Springtime I, consists of little more than repetitive electronic beats and sounds a little like a broken heart monitor.

In terms of user friendliness things do improve. However, the Minny Pops make no concessions to popular music or to an easy listening experience. Which is why you should search out this record as soon as possible.
Recoded in 1979 Drastic Measures, seems, to my ears, to be the work of people who wanted to push to the boundaries the simple electronic music devices that they had. Thus we get simple sounds, repeated or looped, discordant squalls of sound, odd noises and sudden moments of clarity. Great stuff! However, I would hesitate to put Minny Pops into the Industrial category. Although their music is at time abrasive there is much humour and many silly moments.
For Minny Pops, the second track there is a recognisable tune and a guitar. The vocals repeat the phrase "I can feel a machine, I can feel a Minny Pop/ He wants to be a machine, he wants to be a Minny Pop". No, I don't know what it means either. However, it is clearly their manifesto and the merger of man and machine is evident throughout the record.
Hologram could be a transmission from another planet. A transmission that is breaking up or being jammed by hostile forces. Or, as my daughter thought, it sounds like Donald Duck talking on a broken mobile. You decide! I think it sounds like the kind of thing that you would make if you have access to synthesizers and a sense of humour.
Total Confusion is underpinned by some electronic percussion sounds which remind me of the tennis game that you used to get for your TV. Over the tennis-like sounds are swirling electronic noises, the occasional murky vocal and some tinny keyboard.

For me the standout track is Dolphin's Spurt. As with all of the other songs here I have no idea what, if anything the lyrics are about. Delivered in a cold manner, very much in the way of a lot of electronic music, stabbing jerky guitar repeats itself while the keyboards make whistling sounds (perhaps a Dolphin's Spurt) and the precise electronic drums act as a metronome throughout. You could dance to this in the slightly spasmodic way that people danced in the post-punk era. And then suddenly its all over.

Motor City could almost be something from Sonic Youth. Clashing discordant guitars vie with the dry emotionless singer in a squealing fight to the death. Or something.
Over on side two we start with Springtime II which again is largely the broken heart monitor but this time with added stylophone.
According to Monica "Living in Bolivia Ain't So Pretty". The pounding bass pushes Monica along, giving it a dark menace. Velvet's like guitars add to the claustrophobic feel as the song drills down into your head. With the robotic vocals, bass and drums there are clear krautrock influences but the shear tightness of the song seems to turn it away from anything 'hippy'.

Flash Goes the Eye features a sound that is part creaking door hinge, part violin bowed a la John Cale, and part kazoo. Yips and howls abound. Its a children's party gone horribly wrong!
I've always thought that MD Mania, the next track, is a song from the Silicon Teens album that has somehow escaped. Upbeat and perky with the kind of bossa drumming that only early synths could produce, its fun and happy until you listen to the lyrics.
RU21 predates the Mary Chain by a good six years and, although it doesn't have the bubble-gum influences of the Reid brothers, it channels the drones of the Velvets and marries it to some 'young love' lyrics. Although in this case there is something not quite right about the attention the singer is paying to the girl. Hypnotic like a road crash. 

Mono continues the tightly wound, choppy guitars, precise drumming theme but adds some arrhythmic hand claps and some dense and almost choking swampy sounds. I'd hate to hear what Stereo sounds like!

The record ends on New Muzak which sounds like a snippet from a Brian Eno ambient LP. If that's the new Muzak I'm going to spend more time in lifts.

ROGER ROGER/ NINO NARDINI - ANIMALS' CHRISTMAS

It's nearly Christmas so I thought I'd add a Christmas record.
Having said that I'm not really sure how Christmas-y this record it. Despite the title there is nothing really very Christmas-like about this library record.
If you are looking for strange electronic noises that are made to approximate the sounds of animals this is the record for you. If, on the other hand, you want something that sounds like carols then look elsewhere.
Roger Roger and Nino Nardini were electronic pioneers and in much the same way as Jean Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley they found it difficult to find a wide audience. In fact most of their recorded output, together or seperately, is on library records.
Think Radiophonic Workshop but on the farm rather than in space and you have an idea of the kind of sounds that these guys are making here.
I am always amazed at the breadth of music that appeared on library records. What film or TV programme would need an electronic horse noise or a song using bleeting bionic sheep noises?  Maybe they appeared on French children's programmes? Or maybe they were used as cues for some kind of space-age Animal Farm? Or maybe not.
The propensity for early electronic music to be used in a funny setting meant that lots of early moog, electronic or radiophonic tracks have a kind of cartoon quality to them. You can see that they would make very good background to Tom and Jerry comedy violence. An early JJ Perrey track was even picked up by Disney and used at Disneyland. Perhaps it still is.
I found this languishing in the Christmas section of Oxfam and would have flicked past it had I not been intrigued by the children's writting on the front and the back. I am not sure who Sophie and Cathy were but I like to think they were the daughters of either Mr Roger or Mr Nardini. "This album is dedicated to all my little friends, the animals of the world" it says on the back.
A slightly daft record all in all but you would have to be a very hard hearted person not to find it funny. See if you can find it in amongst the Christmas records.

DALEK i - COMPASS KUM'PAS

Every so often I stumble across a record that makes me think "Why hasn't anyone told me about this before?".
In this case no has told me about this before because it seems that no one has heard it or if they have then they don't hear in it what I hear.
Now, I don't mind having strange tastes, after all that's to be expected if you like vinyl in a download age, but the silence over dalek i's Compass, Kum'pas just seems weird to me.
People rave over far lesser 80s post punk bands but despite the current attention to so-called cold wave bands there seems to be no room for dalek i.
In some ways, however, its very refreshing to be able to make your own mind up without being influenced by anyone else.
And my mind is telling me that this in an unjustly forgotten piece of plastic that deserves more attention. So, if after reading this you are intrigued go onto a well known auction website and get a copy. They are really cheap and fairly easy to come by.
Hailing from Liverpool and, like most Liverpool bands, at one point having a future member of Big In Japan in their ranks (Dave Balfe if you are interested) they were obsessed with using electronic means to make music. Needless to say Kraftwerk and Suicide were an influence. Although there are real instruments, such as the tradional guitar, bass and drums they are usually only used to assist the synths.
The most complete history of the band, side-projects and further adventures can be found here: http://robinparmar.com/dalek-i-love-you.html
The LP kicks off with their second single The World. I find this a haunting and dark song. With a very flat vocal Alan Gil sings about the unpleasantness of the world - this is the 'real world'! There is a great bit of one fingered synth work about half way throught that is worthy of the Human League and suddenly the whole thing shudders to a close with what could be a laugh, a cough or a death rattle.
The rest of the record doesn't get very much warmer. 8 Track wonderfully utilises tape manipulation to slow down parts of the song, which together with the sawing guitar, some off key piano work and wordless voical give a woozy, drunken feel.
Next is Destiny (Dalek I Love You) which is the song that got me into Dalek i in the first place. Cold, spacey and slightly anguished I love this song. It is exactly the sort of music that Dr Who should be listening to. "What would I gain to sell my brain to a machine" goes the chorus. As dystopian a pronouncement as you are likely to hear.
Other key tracks are Freedom Fighters, the cover of You Really Got Me and We're All Actors. Freedom Fighters has some bouncy organ work and choppy guitar licks and on first listen seems to be one of the happiest songs on the record. Closer attention to the lyrics soon dispels that idea as it become clear that the song is about someone being attacked by a mob, possibly of fascist skinheads, for no reason.The Kinks, You Really Got Me is stripped down to the drum machine beat and an insistant bass overlaid with some electronic work. Under this onslaught it ceases to be about unrequited love and takes on a rather dictatorial quality. We're All Actors has a slightly ska-ish bass line over short organ stabs. From the sounds of it, being an actor is not all its cracked up to be.
The more I listen the more inventive this LP becomes. Is it too much to compare it to the Beta Bands EP's album? Well, there are, obviously, none of the sampledelica and hip hop influences. But none-the-less there is a similar playfullness and willingness to chuck anything in that will produce the right (wrong) results. The restrainted slightly muted vocals, the slow drum machine beats, the loving synth work and the rare appearance of the guitar combine to make this a rare pleasure.
The cover artwork is also worthy of note. Designed by Chris Hughes of the band the front has a shape that may or may not be meant to represent Japan and this shape appears in reverse on the back of the sleeve. The carefully designed calligraphy lends an almost architectural quality. On the reverse the tracks are listed against a timeline to give an idea of how long they last. A great idea that I've never seen anywhere else.

CHARLES AMIRKHANIAN - MENTAL RADIO

I have long ago given up looking for anything specific in charity shops. The fun, for me, is in letting yourself go and trying something new. For a pound you can suspend critical heirachy and buy anything you want as long as it looks interesting. If you are right and it is interesting you've scored. If not you've dontated a pound to charity.

The congruence of events that brings a record into your hands in a charity shop never ceases to amaze me. Here I am, at the specific time to find this record, and in the right frame of mind to pick it up. Maybe a day later and it wouldn't be there. A day earlier and it would not have been donated.

How did it get here, who owned it before me, was it part of large collection, did the previous owner listen to it often, what were they like?

Back to the charity shop and you know the scene: A man in his early thirties is squatting over a box of records inconveniently placed underneath some acrylic dresses.

His fingers flick over the pile of dog-eared and battered records. His eyes, well practiced in recognising record covers, need no more that a few seconds to take in the pictures. Military Band records, Original Broadway Cast records, Mantovani, Cliff Richard, Phil Collins.

Then he sees something that he does not recognise. Who is this strange man in a boiler suit with a oicture of a toy baseball player projected on to him? He looks odd and unusual and when it turns out that the record is on the CRI label (Composers Recordings Incorporated, A Not-For-Profit, Tax-Exempt Corporation) the deal is done and a pound changes hands

 Charles Amirkhanian describes himself in the linear notes as a 'composer, poet and percussionist' and is 'one of the leading United States exponents of text-sound composition, the intermedium between music and literature.'

Now, there is no doubt that this is music with intellectual pretentions. It is music that is composed rather than written, performed rather than played, involving pieces not songs, and taking in influences ranging from Freud, to Stravinsky and Upton Sinclair.

However, and slightly to my surprise, it is hugely engaging and warm.

This is in no small part the result of the use of early synthesisers. This record was released in 1985 but most of the 'pieces' were recorded in 1981 or 1982. He uses very early drum synths, vocoders and Eventide Harmonisers amongst others as well as off-beam percussion instruments.

Amirkhanian's voice is also very deep and warm and reminds me slightly of Ken Nordine. I like his West Coast accent and his intonation.

He is also clearly very humerous. At one time he says/sings 'Bomb, bomb, fondue' which put a smile on my face. He also recorded the barking of a dog and used it as the basis for the piece 'Dog of Stravinsky'. Perhaps I am laughing slightly at him and he did not mean to be funny. But I can't help myself.

I also love the exploratory way in which the music was made. Rather like one of the Radiophonic Workshop composers he is always looking for ways to make unusal sounds, preferably sounds that have not been made before. He records ducks and dogs and people snoring, he speeds the music up and slows it down, records acoustic instruments and plays them through synths, takes his voice and chops it up and re-arranges it, selects words for their sounds not meanings,

He comes across as part Ken Nordine, part Gil Scott Heron and part loopy teacher. In essence, he comes across as like no one else I have heard before.

There are copious notes about the music which I hope you can read and there is also an insert that came with it as well. It is music to be taken SERIOUSLY.

I would never have searched for this record. If I had heard of Amirkhanian I would probably never have wanted to own one of his recordings. But now I have one and I am very pleased about that.