Label: Black Truffle – BT041 Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Compilation, Reissue, Remastered, Stereo Country: Australia Released: 15 Feb 2019 Genre: Electronic, Non-Music Style: Experimental, Sound Art, Speech, Spoken Word
Opening with a mesmerizing piece from 1978 pairing the voice and tamboura of Anne Klingensmith with letters spat out by a Speak n’ Spell to the accompaniment of the randomized melodic patterns of DeMarinis’s homebuilt electronic instrument “The Pygmy Gamelan”, the record then dispenses with the live human voice in favor of its recorded and synthetic doubles. One can follow DeMarinis’s restless probing of the possibilities of technology, from the hacked Speak n’ Spell (which gives us the austere “Et Tu, Klaatu” (1979), another duet with Klingensmith, on bowed psaltery, in which the toy’s synthetic voice is stretched into an alien song) through to the use of digital samples manipulated with home computer technology in the early 1990s (including a remarkable collage piece that weaves a rare recording of Stalin‘s voice and bird-like electronic twittering derived from its formant – glides into a rich tapestry of samples reflective of the dictator’s musical life). In between is a rich sampling of DeMarinis’s signature work with speech melodies — usually unnoticed melodic inflections that lie within speech patterns — which he analyses and translates into synthesized musical accompaniment. These pieces draw on a wide variety of sources, which range from the hilarious to the menacing, combining elements as seemingly unlikely as Beethoven‘s piano sonatas and the sounds of ’80s synth-pop. The results are an extraordinary combination of the alien and the familiar. As DeMarinis himself characterizes his work with vocal synthesis, this is “a kind of signal that simultaneously carried and obscured meaning and ideation, even as it created a sound world totally alien in aesthetic. (Mint / New)
Tracklist A1 If God Were Alive (& He Is) You Could Reach Him By Telephone 7:30 A2 R4T 5:27 A3 Et Tu, Klaatu 9:24 B1 Eenie Meenie Chillie Beenie 4:19 B2 Novena 6:55 B3 Mind Power 4:07 B4 Yellow Yankee 6:10 C1 I Want You 3:05 C2 Vocal Variety 4:24 C3 Kokole 6:40 C4 Cincinnati 1830-1850 8:14 D1 Edison's Piano 11:31 D2 The Lecture Of Comrade Stalin At The Extraordinary 8th Plenary Congress About The Draft Concept Of The Constitution Of The Soviet Union On November 25, 1936 7:10
