Skip to main content

CV & JAB - Zin Taylor: Thoughts of a Dot As It Travels a Surface (Shelter Press, 2018)

Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett teamed up for a live improvisation based on the works of the artist Zin Taylor. His art adorns the cover here for you to get a sense of his style; and their performance was inspired by a 90-metre wall drawing of Taylor. Their performance was whittled down and re-mixed into the 10 tracks here. The result is a slow, spacious, electro-acoustic, ambient work for synth, piano, flute, field recordings and maybe more? The performance is slowly engrossing and it's interesting to hear the differences from track to track, making me wonder how this worked originally as a 40-minute performance. Maybe we can hear the unedited set someday. This is an inventive and interesting album but it's definitely not stuffy academia. Definitely one to revisit.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Playboi Carti - Die Lit (AWGE/Interscope, 2018)

Playboi Carti has never really been on my radar too much, but then Pfork gave this one a rave review, and I figured I was sleeping...but man, this album didn't do anything for me. Barely any song made any kind of impact. The production is interesting at times but Carti himself gets lost in both that and the whole mass of features all over the album. Nothing gelled for me, so I guess for me I wasn't missing much after all. Oh well.

Ami Shavit - Neural Oscillations and Alpha Rhythms (Finders Keepers, r. 2018)

Another one I wasn't expecting much from but Finders Keepers always gets a fair shake, this turned out to be surprisingly legit. Influenced by Philip Glass and Tangerine Dream in the 70's, "Ami embarked on an experiment with what he coined Alpha Mood – a state in which the brain is working in relaxation and in which he used music as a means of helping induce his own meditative state". These aren't the droney, spacey, meditative synth pieces you'd expect - they're hypnotic in an active sense, very stimulating and dynamic. Seems not much is left of Shavit's recorded legacy but I'm glad I gave these a shot, very neat.

Eartheater - IRISIRI (Pan, 2018)

Eartheater first came on my radar (and many others) with 2 Hausu Mountain tapes in 2015. She makes glitchy, disorienting music, combining electronics and synthesized percussion with voice, guitars and who knows what else. The whole thing is a confusing stew, kind of reminiscent of Inga Copeland but I would say even more detached from "song". Didn't do much for me.