I humbly admit that Gregory Taylor is a new name to me although he has been involved in the electronic music scene for about three decades and even has had his own radio show RTQE since 1986 and was involved in the cassette-culture movement of the late 1970's into the 1980's, nor can I say that gamelan music is something that I’m intimately familiar with. But I can say the same thing about Bernhard Fleischmann and his particular style of German electronic “groovebox” music whom I’d never head of until I discovered and fell in love with his beautiful long-form live recording “Melancholie”. Fortunately, ignorance concerning the source doesn’t preclude appreciation and enjoyment of the music.
Amalgam: Aluminum/Hydrogen is Gregory’s first CD for Palace of Lights. It’s a single recording of a live improvised performance (no post-editing) using a loop-based performance software called “Radial”. For ease of listening it’s been divided into seven subtitled parts on the CD.
Gregory has somehow managed to fuse the soothing and organic percussive tones and timbres of gamelan music with the digital aesthetic that we’ve come to associate with minimal manifestations of the electronic-based ambient and glitch genres. Two contrasting sonic worlds have joined here - the natural, spontaneous sounds of gamelan with the manipulated, shaped sounds of electronic processing. The end result here is an amazingly listenable and engaging piece of electroacoustic-ambient born of musical samples, processing/editing, looping, and amalgamation or, as the insert accompanying the CD describes it, we have music made out of music.
So what's here for the listener? If you’re taste lies in the more gauzy, minimally processed glockenspiel-like sounds, chimes, and gongs then you’ll love the subsections titled “bem”, “gulu”, “pelog”, and “lima”, but if you’re preferences are a hazier, denser, more manipulated ambiance then subsections “dada”, “nem”, and “barang” should appeal to you. This is uplifting, lovely music that blends well with natural environmental acoustics - perfect for early morning or early evening listening. There's definitely something new under the sun here. |
and 