Skip to main content

Prisms

Last year someone donated a carefully-curated collection of vinyl to my local charity shop, including a variety of '70s and early '80s electronica, much of it obscure enough that I'd never heard of the artists before. There was some new-age stuff, Moog-based compilations, numerous LPs by Kitarō and Tomita, etc. Given the music involved, I'd not be surprised if there had also been Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre albums that had been snapped up before I got to see what was left over.

I must have bought eight or nine of those albums in all, and found about half of them to my liking, donating the remainder back to the same shop. Among the successes was Prisms, by Michael Garrison, a 1981 release, the artist's second. Garrison, it seemed, had been a great admirer of "Berlin School" electronica, but, hailing from Oregon rather than Central Europe, he was very far removed from the action. In isolation, he nevertheless acquired a variety of synthesizer equipment and began making music of his own. Garrison achieved some measure of success & recognition over his 11-album career, but in later years he was badly afflicted by alcoholism, and died of liver failure aged only 47.

Prisms is a delight: It strikes me as a suite in which each piece makes a part of a larger whole. The prevailing mood is propulsive and melodic, but there are slower, more atmospheric tracks too. Although there are common recurring characteristics between the pieces (all of them instrumental), the repetition comes across more as positive reinforcement than a tiresome lack of ideas. My copy is the German pressing on the Ariola label. It had initially been issued on Garrison's own Windspell imprint. I also picked up Garrison's 1986 album Images from the same charity shop cache.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...