Customer Reviews

Sinister Kitchen

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Parts of this album are eerily reminiscent of Robert Fripp's "Evening Star" (on the essential Fripp and Eno) Somewhere, Sometime, not quite sure, but I have been there, or perhaps not. It doesn't matter. In all, this feels like a soundtrack that runs through my head, day and night, going everywhere, and then going....nowhere...it doesn't matter. I suggest you find out for yourself........

For a few unusual neuronal complexes the experience of this music will prove to be powerfully invigorating and affirming. For these people this music needn't be categorized as experimental, or probing, or exploratory, or progressive, or whatever. It's just a spectacular conflation of sounds and a veritable banquet of emotionally inspiring sonic manipulation. Still.... thanks to the enormous subjectivity of musical impact, a recording this out of the mainstream won't be showing up on commercial radio or appeal to the vast majority of listeners, who, thanks to the bounty of nature (and for reasons nobody has been able to sufficiently explain) have their wheels spun, probably just as vigorously, by less complex inputs. But that minority, though, who groove on uniqueness, difference, complexity, invention, and a certain oblique approach to sound, will absorb the individuality and the liberty implied by this music like they breathe air and just as necessarily.

Ambience, polyphony, atonality, and organized noise all find their proper and impactful places in this mix. Even though there are many extended passages of darkly reflective ambience, distant sonic rumblings and unusual sounds continually flow in and out, or leap aggressively into the foreground. All manner of fascinating musical musings occur as a result. There are astonishing textures, both soft and harsh, and wonderful contrasts and combinations of feelings. Passages of dark, somber reflection are simultaneously uplifting and calming, and even the harsh juxtapositions of noise and sound on "The Battle of Seattle" aren't merely abrasive, narrow symbols of an ongoing social struggle but seem to capture a fleeting resolution of feelings in a way that all good art mysteriously manages.

Naturally it's difficult to categorize this stuff. It's more or less a species of electronic music that happens to be semi-ambient, avant-garde, and rocking too. The cover of the cd says, "All Sinister Kitchen compositions on this disk were created via extensive digital and analog manipulation of songs originally recorded by the band Two Loons For Tea" (whose excellent work is also worth acquiring!). It well illustrates a fact so glaring in the techno-digital era: that open heads don't care how their musical banquets get made. Musical expression is just organized sound: diverse, polyglot, effusive, infusing and endlessly absorbing. As the cover also says, "No electrons are ever harmed in the process"! Keep your synapses open and let these electrons animate your tissue in new and rewarding ways.