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Looper's Delight
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Hi all, Please excuse the tiresome self-aggrandizement. I don't write so very often (though I've been lurking here for over six years or more). My recent CD project just got it's first online review and I can't help but want to share. It (the review) is sarcastic, well written and (to be fair) probably pretty darn accurate. It could be taken as either positive or negative depending on your tastes. I myself am not entirely sure -- ha! I'm just thrilled to have some press finally. I pass it along to you thus ... see you on the funway! >From DEAD ANGEL (Issue 48 - 9/01/01) URL: http://www.monotremata.com/dead/issues/da48.html Ted Killian -- FLUX AETERNA [pfMENTUM] I've never heard of guitarist Ted Killian before, but apparently i should have. He's a guitarist in the vein of Fripp, Sharrock, and maybe even David Gilmour, creating droning and repetitive soundscapes with tweaked electric and acoustic guitars, often over a bedrock of alien-sounding loops. Some of this, like "Last Sparrow," is the sound of machines hallucinating -- in fact, in many ways this is a throwback to seventies acid-rock, only with more modern (and out-there) influences. Ambient, singing guitars play hypnotic avant-blues lines while other guitars hover quietly in the background on lock 'n lull. Imagine Sonny Sharrock playing for Pink Floyd while Fripp natters on in the background with slo-mo starlight guitar loops that suffice for a "beat." That's the general gist of the songs here. The opener, "Hubble," begins with throbbing, swirling drone and graduates to brilliant, celestial guitars bursting like fireworks. "Leaving Medford," probably owes as much to Tangerine Dream as it does to any avant-guitar icons -- it's a pulsing slab o' tones rippling beneath a winding, scorched-earth guitar playing demented psychedelic machine blues. My favorite is probably "Last Sparrow," which opens with an endless chittering guitar loop, then slowly builds to a massive, droning collection of drawn-out machine tones before exiting on the same endless loop. "Recurvate Paint" sounds like something that could have come about during a collaboration with David Gilmour, circa his first solo album, and Fripp during his ambient Frippertronics phase. Pinging, ringing, endless ambient guitars become the backdrop to slo-mo psychedelic blues -- it sounds glacial and beautiful and seems to last forever. "Reverse Logic" is pretty bizarre in its own right, sounding like M's "Pop Muzak" as remixed by Techno-Animal and ripped apart, then rebuilt by grindcore players under the direction of Sonny Sharrock and Painkiller. By contrast, the guitars in "Convocation Solitaire" are all pretty ones -- acoustic, electric, clean, distorted, whatever, they're ringing those celestial tones. "Gravity Suspended" almost sounds like it could have come from a mislaid late-sixties Pink Floyd record -- in a lot of ways it's a kissing cousin to "The Narrow Way" -- but the title track is far weirder, more alien and monochromatic, like the sound of the Monolith in 2001 vibrating, until a violin-like guitar soars above the increasingly noisy bedrock. This is seriously spaced-out stuff, and really well-executed to boot. This disc is one of the unexpected surprises of the issue....