 
Audiolab
2003
2CD
Lucky Kitchen
Baked Goods, BoaMelody Bar
72.51 Stewart Gott
16 December 2003 experimental | A sprawling collection of musical and sound works commissioned by the Caisse des depots, Paris, and currently on tour to “specially designed audio listening spaces” in the museums of Europe, this is a fascinating conglomeration of the tuneful and the dissonant, of the raucous and the subtle. In amongst the guys you’ve heard of - Steve Roden, Vladislav Delay, Monolake, To Rococo Rot, Curd Duca - are a clutch of less familiar names, many of them French, most of them fascinating. There are two truly extraordinary tracks: Antye Greie-Fuchs (AGF)’s ‘downBYtheLAKE’, spoken word over brittle fragments, echoing and ebbing, a truly chilling musical experience - Laurie Anderson for the twenty first century, and Rebecca Bournigault’s uneasy, monotone, ‘Intentions’. The funereal organ of Henrik Plenge Jakobsen’s ‘Plasmatic Prisms’ is another standout. Many of the tracks clock in at ten minutes or more, but such is the standard, that very seldom does this feel like too long. The compilation hangs together well too. I still put down as my favourite audio-visual experience staring at a blank white canvas while listening to the silence of Richard Chartier on headphones at the Whitney in New York a couple of years ago, but if this lot are coming anywhere near me then maybe that memory will be eclipsed. Even without the show these discs make an absorbing listen.
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