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RER TDDM2
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"A subtle, moody, rich and wide-ranging work, in which atmosphere, emotion and dramaturgy lead the ear far beyond music into a world of hints, evocations, anticipation and association -- and, in passing, reveal a complex metonymic language that, at a deep level, invokes that mostly unconscious lexicon of sound we have all absorbed collectively and subliminally in the course of a century of movie-going, television viewing, documentary recording and electroacoustic experimentation. Once sounds have been abstracted from events, they are free to act and interact as signs; they are no longer indications of the real. And from their use as indicators we learn new meanings (the low drone from Jaws, the shower strings from Psycho, a TV theme -- these are all as directly meaningful to us as a barking dog or an approaching train; after 1000 movies, the sound of a helicopter has as many fictional as factual meanings, and these accretions make experience imaginatively richer. This is the language Dockstader and Myers explore, and although, in a sense, such signs are weightless (there is nothing there) nevertheless we cannot unhook them and they conjure instinctively fragmentary narratives, events, places, situations and meanings. Where their last CD (Pond) abstracted sounds from real life (in fact, documentary recordings of frogs), this one invokes a fictional life invoked in a language of purely mediated abstraction."
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RER TDDM1
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"Tod Dockstader and David Lee Myers are two pioneers of electronic music, but from very different epochs. Dockstader started working with optical sound in the 1950s, later working with vast Telefunken tape recorders that became so hot they had to be left overnight to cool down. His electronic soundscapes ('Lunar Park' and 'Apocalypse' among them) are now being re-discovered and given the respect they deserve. Pond is his first new album-length piece since 1967. David Lee Myers, on the other hand, made his name in the 1980s under the name Arcane Device, and the music was derived from almost uncontrollable feedback systems. His Engines of Myth was originally released by ReR on vinyl in 1988, and was re-released on CD in 2001. A collaboration between these two legendary figures -- the painstaking, highly organised researcher Dockstader with the younger, more go-with-the-flow Myers, is an intriguing proposition. The first problem to overcome was computers; Dockstader had never used them, having perfected methods of working with optical and tape formats. It was only with much coaxing from Myers that it became possible. Dockstader recently remarked that when he began working with computers he 'realised that many of the old principles -- slowing, speeding, pitch-change, reversal -- were the same -- but with much more control and better sound. And no tape hiss. Because it was faster and I could keep my belief in what I was doing, more fun.' Fun is what they had. Most of the sounds derive from frog and toad calls, garnered by hanging around ponds with recorded equipment late into the night. The results are extraordinary -- the cries are transformed into an electronic melee that does not so much resemble a pond, as fragments of a road-movie soundtrack left over by Kraftwerk or Eno."
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