Amalgam Aluminum Hydrogen

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Song Title Time Price Visit our audio page for more information Like Robert Henke, Keith Fullerton Whitman, or Christopher Willits, Gregory Taylor takes on the problem of developing new ways to originate pieces by setting aside typical compositional / improvisational techniques in favor of developing new technologies capable not only of generating sound, but of creating music. Here he unifies the practice of synthesis, sampling, processing and looping into a single, simultaneously occurring stream of events that the listener perceives in the same living moment in which the composer creates. The resulting music is a shifting, densely interrelated cloud of layered and juxtaposed materials which essentially make music out of music. References point forward to a completely post-modern aesthetic while acknowledging a deep love of past and traditional musics, especially the intricate patterns and lush tunings of gamelan. Gregory's approach creates a deep context that allows the listener to follow the sometimes smooth, sometimes abrupt turns to the entirely new, while discovering the subtle and numerous coherences of all the elements. His first CD for Palace of Lights, Amalgam: Aluminum / Hydrogen proves to be a marriage of buoyancy and structure. It is a single unedited recording of a live improvised performance by a radiaL virtuoso that unites the tunings and epicyclic forms of gamelan music that characterized Taylor's '80s cassette culture releases with the timbres and aural surfaces of glitch, ambient and lowercase musics. See all Reader Reviews When two cultures intersect it can be either a collision or a marriage. Gregory Taylor's deep, 25-year love affair with the music of Java has evolved into a new synthesis of tradition and innovation, moving way beyond imitation into an uncharted wilderness. "Amalgam" begins with bell-like tones in a digital approximation of a gamelan, but gradually the album morphs into long, non-percussive synthesizer tones, still in slendro scales, but with structures more akin to Basil Kirchin or Philip Glass than gamelan. Taylor's unique cross-pollination is subtle and rich, paradoxically evoking the beauty and languidness of Indonesian culture while delivering it with increasingly noisy and discordant synthesizer voices. It is remarkable how he retains the spirit of Java, which he so loves, as the music progresses from tradition to sublime innovation.  Comment | Permalink |  (Report this) Back To Top