Compositions In D Minor

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A single-sided LP which gives the IllegalArt treatment to the songs of obscure (or nonexistent but convincingly contrived) C&W non-star Diane Minor. Crawl Unit, J. Allen Williams, Trance, Illusion of Safety and Personna Non Grata use only Minor's music to [re|de]construct Diane's canon of non-hits. each artist approaches the project uniquely. Williams reduces a song to bite/byte-sized fragments and cobbles together a spasmodic techno-mosaic. the PNG piece could be mistaken for Autechre or Matmos at either unit's most abstractly inventive. Diane Minor's presence is vestigial at best. Crawl Unit dithers a few of Diane's choice revolutions through a scree(n) of granulated, super-sampled Minor minutiae. Illusion of Safety and Mason Jones (in Trance guise) have the most musicially satisfying entries - Trance's a nightmarish collision of Minor and noisy chatter/clatter loops; IoS bending, shifting and layering verses of Diane's mushy AOR, relying on hypnotic repetition of key piano and vocal phrases ("in circles") for maximal disorientation. Does anyone remember the moment in "Love Story" when Oliver first learns of Jenny's terminal illness, and the first five notes of Francis Lai's insufferably cloying theme are plunked out on a piano in a cataleptic loop? IoS manage to out-daze that instance of heart-tugging pathos here. No mean feat.