Browse by Artist: BARTOS, KARL

Artist:	BARTOS, KARL
Title:	Communication
Label:	HOME
Format:	2LP
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	HOME 004LP

"When Karl Bartos produces music, he spends hours filling up his old IBM with digital data so that the speech synthesis system can understand amplitudes, formants and vocal transients and actually speak to him, before watching a little Sesame Street -- without the sound. Then he might scroll through the writings of media theoretician and critic Neil Postman or cut in a sentence from the works of Bret Easton Ellis, so that the speech synthesis has something to say. 'Let me recreate the world for you'. Communication, the first solo Karl Bartos album since the Electric Music Project (Esperanto, Electric Music), works on something like the same principle of a camera obscura: the light of the outside world beams into a dark room through a tiny hole, projecting an image onto the wall. The image is upside down, but you can see it quite clearly. Concept album is a terrible term. This is music as an emotional experience. Bartos can manipulate the old IBM with just the same mastery as the logic audio. But he is as uninterested in the old filter to filter interaction as he is in the bass knob at 350 hertz. Those kind of things just slow you down. It is not for nothing that Bartos worked for two years before 16 songs were reduced to 10. And what songs they are. Karl Bartos knows his history and has a unique ability to update it with contemporary methods. 80's soundscapes with modern beats and loops. Catchy melodies re-worked thematically by somebody educated on the counterpoint and the finer points of harmonics. Call it electro -- B. B. King / anything. and everything revolves around one thing -- the song. Karl Bartos' sound unites -- transcending the generations."

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