Herewith part 2 of our Generations Unlimited cassette bonanza.
David Prescott offers Walking In Slow Circles (R.GU-DP1). David runs the label with Gen Ken and this is a reissue of a tape which they originally put out in 1987. Working in Boston, this American player issued most of his work from 1986 to 1989, much of it on cassettes, then apparently stopped or moved on to other activities. If you want to hear a little-known gem in this field, tune in now…I’m struck today by the inventiveness and originality of Prescott’s synth sounds, and sense very strongly he has worked long and hard to create these effects. But the music is also quite bleak, slow, and slightly unsettling. It manages to do this without once straying close to that strand of Industrial music where the sole aim appears to be to depress and demoralise the listener, instilling us with a sense of futility. Conversely, Prescott’s delicate loops and intricate patterns intrigue the listener, while creating a wholly abstract world of sound on its own terms. You will soon feel drawn into a hermetic world, and sealed in as surely as entering a vacuum flask.
Gen Ken’s Stepping Through Rooms (R.GU-GK1) is from 1987 and was recorded at Conrad Schnitzler’s studio in Berlin. Here we can witness the genial American fellow coming under strong European influence. It’s almost the Kluster album that never was, and exhibits the same concerns with abstraction, austerity, and near-bleak minimalism. Yet there’s also an aesthetic delight in the wide variety of strange electronic sounds, and their mysterious arrangement working to logical structures which are hard to discern. Many of the track titles seem to be alluding to scientific endeavours taking place under cover, to new sentient beings and maybe even life on other planets. Gen Ken may have felt himself to be an exploratory sound-scientist, discovering the laws of physics on his own terms. While this is a somewhat challenging listen with its grey tones, unfinished structures and general air of uncertainty, it is impressive how much information Gen Ken manages to pack into short two or three-minute packages.
If, Bwana is Al Margolis, another great hero of the 1980s cassette “scene”. His Magnetic Beauty (GU-IB1) is a recent piece, recorded in 2014. It’s a set dedicated to reprocessing, and everything we hear is an earlier, prepared piece of source material which has been passed through the innards of an ARP 2600 synthesizer. The ARP 2600 was originally produced in 1971 and discontinued in 1980; it was directly competing with the offerings of Bob Moog. It’s an analogue instrument which allows patching and routing, and I sense it was designed to foster experimentation within the creative and adventurous mind. The pieces on Magnetic Beauty are thus by default from the same 1980s vintage as many of the others in this batch, and remain equally as abstract and cold as many of their fellows. Margolis takes bold, creative decisions, and the work is not so much about transformation of source material as creating striking and unusual compositions which will amaze and confound the listener. When some composers do the “reprocessing” thing, quite often they will make a fetish out of the very act of doing it, and are apt to point out to the listener the very mechanics of what they are doing. By contrast, Margolis doesn’t seem to care about his own original sources, and wants to present the voice of the ARP chattering insanely and unpredictably on its own terms. The reprocessing is simply a means to an end. Sheer warped genius at work.