Tape Play: 10 Works for Electronic Tape

The label Pogus brought another stone to the collective effort to make the music of avant-garde composer Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) available to the public. Tape Play collects all ten tape works Gaburo created in his 30-plus years of musical activity. Five of them were created during the mid-'60s, three in the '70s-'80s, and the last two were completed only months before the composer died. The interest of Tape Play goes beyond its archival qualities: the album has cohesion and every piece sounds fresh. The works range from sound collages to pure electronic pieces. The first two compositions are impressive maniacal sound collages; "Fat Millie's Lament" (1965) includes manipulated segments from a recording of Morgan Powell's piece "Odomtn." "The Wasting of Lucrecetzia" is a collage made from sped-up percussion loops and screaming/laughing voices that foretell Frank Zappa's early collage works, particularly "The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny" (released in 1968 on the Mothers of Invention's seminal album We're Only in It for the Money). Electronic pieces such as "Lemon Drops" have a lot of charm. But the most striking piece ends the album — "Kyrie: ORBIS FACT/OR: a very odd do" is a fascinating creepy piece putting together plain chant and a narration of the nursery rhyme "This Old Man" that gradually degrades to the point of undecipherability. ~ François Couture, Rovi