(Avantgarde) Chris Cutler, Lutz Glandien, Marie Goyette, Zygmunt Krauze, Otomo Yoshihide - P53 (1995) - 1995, APE (tracks), lossless

Some people say that avant-garde music is just sound with all the musicality ripped out of it. Such people should listen to this.
That's not to say this is accessible or anything. Most of your friends will probably still hate it. Your girlfriend will probably think you've been doing some kind of narcotics. Your cat will probably run away to live in an alley somewhere, eking out a bare survival by licking up the dried juices from discarded cans of tuna.

But, if you want to take my word for it (and there's no real reason why you should, except that I have the best taste in music ever), this is quite a beautiful piece of music, all the while being weird and infectiously, devilishly spirited. And it's definitely musical, even to the less-discerning ear, probably due to the pianists who play some downright lovely stuff. I think a lot of people who have at least some appreciation for modern music might like this. Don't get me wrong -- there're still noisy, dissonant, and weird parts, but they're FUN noisy, dissonant, and weird parts.

Chris Cutler was commissioned to do this project for the Frankfurt Jazz Festival. The performers consist of Chris Cutler (objects, low grade electronics, drums), Otomo Yoshihide (turntables, homebuilt guitar), Marie Goyette (grand piano), Zygmunt Krauze (grand piano), and Lutz Glandien (computer, sampling, real-time processing of the pianos and drums).

The music is tough to describe, especially for a pretty dense person such as myself. From the external vantage point, the music is a tapesty blend of disparate elements, from idyllic piano to environmental sounds to mysterious squalls of feedback on guitar to nasty turntable battle damage to percussive, chromatic piano crashes to avant-percussive pitter-patter to...well, and on and on. The two pianos are the center of the group, often playing downright beautiful, romanticist solos but equally comfortable with angular, dissonant chordal landscapes. Glandien manipulates the pianos with revelatory effects, sampling their parts which are then reversed, inverted, cut up, re-played, propelled by processed snippets of Cutler's percussion and swathed in feedback. Cutler's role is mostly that of filling in crevices with percussive spatter, but there are times when he just grooves. And when he does, he grooves like a BEAST. (Sidenote: There are three measures of groovitude: Beast [power grooves], demon [sick grooves], and ninja [sneaky grooves].) Yoshihide wrestles some truly messy sounds out of his guitar while his turntable smashes into the music's core head-on or subtly slips into sporadic breaches. If that all sounds like it would be nothing but a mess, well, common sense suggests that you'd be right. But the ensemble holds it together _somehow_, probably because of the sheer confidence and inspiration behind their playing. Also, and perhaps most importantly, the music just has a surreal way of making sense. I'm not sure what the balance of composition versus improvisation here is, but for whatever reason it just has a very absorbing overall dynamic that I find utterly fascinating.
Chris Cutler has a PILE of fantastic stuff. _p53_ is one of my favorites.
By Lord Chimp (Monkey World)