Well we know this San Franciscan electronic duo love to cloak their albums within large conceptual devices often related explicitly to where they’ve located their sound palette. Their last album, Civil War was created in part using civil war memorabilia and imagery. A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure utilised sounds of plastic surgery being conducted.
This album however is a little different, creating sound portraits of historical figures they admire. And it’s more like their sonic reimaginings of the characters world, though they also acted out specific events in the person’ life and utilised some of the objects involved as sound sources. Thus we have this cheeky rickety ragtime piece for William Burroughs that is brought to a halt by a gunshot, referencing his William Tell experiment where he shot his wife in the head. This is followed by some strange indescipherable music concrete sounds wrestled around a typewriter that becomes a percussive Arabic (Master Musicians of Joujouka) influenced hallucinatory stomp, referring to his time in Tangiers. Yet you get the feeling that it all goes much deeper than this. Digitalia and assorted sounds are skittering around wildly and you get the feeling that every sound, the way that it is layered, and even the manner in which it progresses is loaded with multiple meanings. There’ a piece for philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in which they’ve used the sounds of cows eating, manure, roses, teeth and geese, for Darby Crash they’ve had Drew Daniel crying out in pain as he is burnt by the Germs Don Bolles, and the Kronos Quartet provide mournful strings for Joe Meek. It’s an album that can broadly be linked to Mathew Herbert’s Plat Du Jour, in its strict adherence to the conceptual idea, often ahead of the musical, yet it’s still very musical and if you weren’ aware of the concepts it would hardly matter as the music is beautiful, diverse strange and groundbreaking in its ability traverse genres. So it’s kind’ve ironic in that perhaps their most dense conceptual effort is also their most musically accessible.
