Data Rape

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"Rape" is a rather harsh and misleading term for the eight predominantly mellow and otherworldly sonic experiments on this disk, which were created through the linking and reconfiguring of eight vintage human voice synthesizers (marketed by Texas Instruments in the 1970s as Speak and Spell). Individual words are not discernable in the music, nor are there even any recognizable phonemes (speech sounds), but the dense electronic chatter of the collective instruments does sometimes suggest the involvement of sentient beings rather than just machines. The opening track (one of the best) could well be a field recording of a choral group from E.T.'s home world; and several other tracks could have resulted from highly sensitive miniature microphones being lowered into an ant colony. Still other tracks have the liquid sound of running water, giving additional meaning to the phrase "babbling brook." Sometimes there's a suggestion of distant alarms ringing in long, empty laboratory corridors, and one piece sounds a great deal like Tibetan overtone singing as rendered by Buddhist robots. The violent CD title seems most appropriate on one slightly more aggressive piece which uneasily combines a number of chattering data streams and evokes vague thoughts of a cave full of rabid bats. The only weak aspect of the CD is an occasional imaginative lapse in the final processing or shaping. Granted, it's probably desirable that the raw data streams of the voice synthesizers receive some further processing at times, and most of the treatments are highly effective. However, a few pieces rely too heavily on a simplistic rhythmic pulse reverb or phasing effect -- the old echo in a rain barrel cliche -- and the obviousness of this rhythmic manipulation sometimes works against the strangeness the textures.