Dub Taylor – Lumière For Synthesized & Concrète Sound
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Label: Varèse International – VS 81001 Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Blue Country: US Released: 1973 Genre: Electronic Style: Musique Concrète, Experimental
Wild, KFW-approved Musique Concrete with big Creel Pone feel.. Keiths words below!
Zonked - you’d probably yield about half of the titles here on the MMS site if you entered that term into the (R.I.P..) search engine. It’s a nice catch-all adjective that I use to denote sound-projects that cause the fluids in my central-vocabulary-lobe to dry up just as I’m gearing to describe them in words. So handy...
This record is zonked, and by that I don’t mean that I can’t conjure up other adjectives (I most certainly can: Fried, Surrealist, Inept, Genius, etc...), just that I can’t get my head around describing what it is Mr. Taylor is doing exactly. It almost sounds like someone... as the Brits say “Taking The Piss” on Musique Concrète... but then again there’s this twisted logic to the construction of the whole thing that’s just so... OUT... (i.e. “I know... let’s just pile everything up on top of itself and not edit it at all...”) - the sound-combinations so seemingly random that’s it’s hard to believe a conscious composer/technician type laid this to tape back in 1972.
My favorite bits are when a voice (I assume it’s the Composer’s) comes in near the beginning, half-buried: “Sounds Good...” from there a wave of surging/burbling synths and filtered white noise let loose on the whole frequency range, leaving little in the way of... you know... “Musical Sense”... there are some bike-horns, what sounds like someone dialing in an FM radio (then leaving it between stations), a jet passing overhead, a guitar-amp feeding back while someone “Snaps” into a microphone, etc... sounds are panned hard left/right for entire sides at a time. some backwards speaking kind of rises to the top, then it’s back to “Normal”... and that’s just the first side...
From here on out, any time someone plays me a record like The Shaggs or Y. Bhekhirst, reveling in the fact that it got made in the first place, I’m going to play them this, as it’s so much better on an example. I’m just completely dumbfounded that the sentient folks over at Varese International went the distance... Kudos! (Correction: VI was Taylor's own imprint, and this was the first release).
note: their are a bunch of drop-outs on the b-side that are, (un)surprisingly, part of the sonic stew, not any weird mastering issues on p.c.’s part (wouldn’t be the first time he’s fallen asleep at the console though! that lout...)
