Various - Emit 1197
This latest album in the critically acclaimed Emit series is filled my plush executive style office with the sounds of incense, creating infinite space on this warm damp spring day here in Seattle.
It's the sixteenth in a series, and what a series, beginning in 1994 with the release of a compilation that immediately attracted the interest of the worlds music press. With new releases every season Emit continually challenges listeners to expect the unexpected and to assume that what they are hearing is what they should have been hearing all along.
Don't expect predictability as a series either. Emit 0096, for example, explores the paradoxical phenomenon of consciousness during sleep, combining a spoken narrative thread and numerous illustrative case studies with disturbing 3-D soundscapes, alien time signatures and hypnotic circadian rhythms, while Emit 1196 presents Carl Stone, a Californian sampling extremist whose oddly emotive music uses customised recording technology to zoom deep into tiny fragments of sound. It's an amazing album, you get to feast on the music of the future.
Back to Emit 1197, the latest from Nottingham (UK) label Time Recording, listening to the ultra nature sound renderings of Dallas Simpson's Waterpump I momentarily imagine a world without Rock and Roll, where music is allowed to go where it pleases without being manacled to choruses and riffs, a world where shopping malls play music that make you happy instead of ill.
As time shifts into low gear here in my room the deep future organic machine sounds of Hywel Davies's apus apus complete with 3D sound imaging courtesy of Roland Corp., again set my mind adrift.
I don't want this album to stop. And I'll never tire of it.
Rating - 921,718 (out of a possible 1,000,000)
