Writing about complex music with time, distance and acquaintance all against me is not a very bright thing to be doing. Even more than usual, a reader will be stuck with this reviewer's half-witted musical biography when the music itself should be communicating.
But maybe a lack of alternative sources is some justification.
PETER PRINCIPLE (born Peter Dachert) is a fluent, wide-ranging and still-active musician. Known mainly as an early (and continuing) member of San Francisco art band TUXEDOMOON, PRINCIPLE has worked in Europe and America on solo, group and collaborative projects in recording, in performance and in creating music for ballet, video and film. As evidenced in this reissue of his (third) solo album from 1990 his taste runs to psychedelia, ambient sound, improvisation, muisque concrete and New Wave electronica with a confident indifference to niche creation.
The strengths and weaknesses of this album fly around the same thought that it could all be film music, an emotive reinforcement to someone else's unwinding story. In the right space the story would be the listener's own. It could be the soundtrack to the discovery of an ambitious and aesthetically sensitive self image. It could certainly be the emotional focus of a warm afternoon at a music festival in Perugia or Reims.
It opens with mind tuggingly strange notes and sounds from the dream-like "Choc Mol 1746", with its widely spaced, descending scales, natural sounding reverberations, and a distant pulse of something orchestral/urban while higher-pitched continuous sounds float in and out of the listeners awareness. From there "Day One" and Day Two" introduce minimalist melody and rhythm with stronger performance elements. In "Day Two" PRINCIPLE seems to set off on a bass guitar loop that says "I am a bass player, but it’s too easy and I'm just going to repeat these five notes and get on with something more interesting till the bird song starts". And it is a very sweet bird song, crossing us over into the super chilled "Sphinx Variations" that plays with light guitar chords and natural sounds in a very peaceful trance. It’s live origin assures attention is held for the full 6 minutes 55.
"Evening Country" is a spacey, astringent contrast, an aural sorbet before the expansive 12 minutes of "Realm of Shades" which takes the electronic baton on and out into deeper and darker locations. Some of this is little more than discovering great noise – noise that has become the staple of cheap cinema and surround sound DVD - but it doesn’t wallow in sensationalism. There is subtlety – especially in the electronic echoes that evoke a lonely reminder of the real birdsong from "Day Two". The spatial and dynamic movement is pretty fine too.
|
"The Pavilion" starts to get invaded with insect noise, radio and film collage and a distinct horror film ambience. It is quite disturbing – the way sounds that had been comforting and peaceful in earlier pieces are now melting off into something altogether more anxious and nightmarish, as if we've all been relocated to an apartment building full of psychotics and obsessives in a bad part of a wholly foreign city.
On first hearing "Maya" I was shocked to recognise a theme that I had heard recently on the latest recording by Sunburned Hand of the Man. There's a similar disordered mental state involved. Central America is evoked, with it's suggestions of peyote and loss of temporal awareness. There's a throbbing rhythm and a swirling half tune on guitar that smokes across the senses forever. Or for four minutes 32 – it’s hard to tell. Fine stuff.
"Ceremonial Polka" starts to bring things back to something you could link with the New Romantic origins of Tuxedomoon. Something that you might even dance to. It shares the singing guitar and live origins of "Maya". That must have been some festival.
Further variations and approaches take us through to a partial reprise of Track 1. Absurdist titling leaves us with "Choc Mol Rotterdaemmerung": "Choc Mol 1746" drawn out across a dissection table and squirted with red and purple dye. And, I imagine, a glass harmonica in some of those snatched and piercing notes as they repeatedly descend the full, but gradually shortened and disrupted scale that had brought us in.
|
