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(...) It was a relaxing
feeling, especially after a day spent tracking anxiety-making news about
the troops' tortuous trek toward Baghdad. The Dave's Waves disc
is even more mesmerizing, like having your own La Monte Young sound
installation but with followable, almost melodic, transformations in the
beat patterns. Perhaps someone should look into the possibility of
piping First's hypnotic tones into the Iraqi countryside in hopes of
calming everyone down. Or better yet, into the White House. |
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Let me start by
dedicating this review to the spineless individual who wrote in to the
site to complain about my use of culinary metaphors and provided a false
email address so I couldn't even send him a recipe in return. As my wife
is fond of reminding me, the only things that matter in life seem to be
music and food (plus a few other things we won't go into), and I'd like
to think David First would agree: "Dave's Waves", subtitled
"A Sonic Restaurant", was originally an installation of the
same name in Lier in Belgium, another country where food matters, where
listeners (diners?) could seat themselves at a table, don a set of
headphones, peruse the menu and select the track of their choice from a
CD player in front of them. This takeaway version consists of four
"entrées", "Cross-eyed Luck", "Closet
Earth", "Queen Siesta" and "Harebrainer", each
lasting 19'33", and for those unfamiliar with First's cuisine, it's
all about drones. Drones have been around for quite some time in occidental art music (and
for thousands of years in other cultures), more precisely since post-War
contemporary composition drove headlong into a perceptual cul de sac
by coming up with theory-heavy compositional systems that seemed to have
little to do with their sounding result. Those connoisseurs who treasure
their battered copies of La Monte Young's "Drift Study" and go
to extraordinary lengths to acquire the music that grew out of Young's
early 60s Dream Syndicate group (with John Cale, Angus Maclise and the
somewhat over hyped Tony Conrad) are strongly encourage to book a table
at Dave's Waves right away, since First, whose career has involved
collaborations with musicians as diverse as Cecil Taylor and Richard
Lloyd, is quite simply a master chef when it comes to cooking up
harmonics. "Cross-eyed Luck" is a set of frequencies that
glissando gently through the brain's alpha wave range and out into the
listening space. On headphones it's deeply relaxing, but blasted out
into your apartment it's a thriller. "Closet Earth", it says
here, fixes its harmonics at the fundamental resonant frequency of the
Earth's electromagnetic field, the so-called Schumann Resonance, but the
music is far from static - a gently manipulated sawtooth wave sweeps in
and out of view. First's menu is keen to stress the music's therapeutic
qualities: writing of "Queen Siesta", whose frequencies move
through the delta wave range, he reminds us that this latter is
"the brain wave signal of the subconscious, the seat from which
intuition arises," adding: "this one is for the connoisseur -
those who make it all the way through will be amply rewarded." That
might sound like your mum telling you to eat up your greens, but it's
nowhere near as traumatic an experience as it sounds. The closing "Harebrainer"
though is a real rollercoaster ride, with First including phase shifted
filtered white noise to set up nothing less than a monstrous groove.
Guaranteed to get your head spinning, indeed. Bon appetit! |
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The
music and cover concept of this album are taken from a sound
installation David First performed in Lier, Belgium. The music consists
of four soundscapes of 19 minutes 33 seconds each, made of sine waves
and pulsating drones. The frequencies have been selected to influence
your alpha and delta brain waves. First is also fond of Schumann
Resonance frequencies (harmonics of the frequency of the Earth's
electromagnetic field). To produce the expected results, these pieces
require a certain amount of good faith from the listener, but they stand
very well on their own as slow-moving electronic drones — and despite
its title, “Queen Siesta" is the darkest of all four, its low
rumbles and rich pulsations offering quite an experience. Even if you
don't usually like this kind of minimalist music, you should consider Dave's Waves,
if only for its cover concept. The album is presented like a “sonic
restaurant": the music is the food, the gatefold sleeve your menu.
First guarantees that his frequency relationships are 100% natural and
that he provides “the finest sonically transcendent experiences
available today." “After undergoing intense measurement, these
waveforms are lovingly combined, then tastefully overtoned and modulated
to bring out the special essences that we hope Dave's Waves is known
for." This reviewer has rarely read liner notes this
mouth-watering. This is the first international (i.e. non-Italian)
release from the Ants label, in its professionally pressed CDr series. |
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Eclettico
ed imprevedibile, David First, ci aveva da poco stupito con un album di
canzoni aliene ("Universary") e in passato con escursioni
minimaliste per chitarra, tra Hendrix e La Monte Young. "Dave's
Waves" all'apparenza è un progetto più ambizioso e risultato di
un'installazione sonora in quel di Lier in Belgio. Un vero ristorante
sonico! Come da sottotitolo e con un menù a base di lettori esposti su
dei tavoli ben preparati per nutrire le menti degli ascoltatori con la
più fine "brainwave music" dai tempi delle manipolazioni di
personaggi come Alvin Lucier o David Rosenboom. "Il nostro
desiderio, qui a "Dave's Waves", è soddisfarvi con le più
raffinate e trascendenti esperienze soniche oggi reperibili. Per questo
usiamo soltanto le più pure ed accurate forme d'onda nei nostri
paesaggi sonori. Dopo intense misurazioni queste forme d'onda vengono
amabilmente combinate, quindi gustosamente modulate e fuse armonicamente
per porgervi le speciali essenze per cui speriamo "Dave's
Waves" sia conosciuto. Sedetevi, mettetevi a vostro agio e gustate
la vostra immersione...". Note di copertina che non potrebbero
essere più eloquenti oltre che dotate di gustosissimo humor. Se non
l'avete ancora capito si tratta di quattro lunghi brani generati
dall'accoppiamento di diverse frequenze. Si va dai 7-12 hertz di
Crosseyed Luck, onde alfa che inducono rilassamento ed espansione della
mente, a quelle più oscure di Closet Earth, sulla stessa lunghezza
d'onda della frequenza risonante dei campi elettromagnetici della terra,
la cosiddetta "Schumann Resonance". "Delta waves"
poi per sonni profondi in Queen Siesta, per chiudere in bellezza con
misurate combinazioni di "Schumann Resonances" e rumore bianco
filtrato dalle oscillazioni LFO. Forme statiche che evolvono lentamente,
drones pulsanti realmente garantiti al 100%!! Insomma un'autentica
esperienza sonica. |
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Major
ear-damaging monotonous noise ahoy! Here’s four horrendously powerful
ultra drone-works from American composer and sometime guitarist David
First. This collection presents itself as a ‘sonic restaurant’ and
the sleeve notes describe each recording as an item on a menu - a
light-hearted conceit but, yikes! - the noises that leap out of the disc
and fill up your room are little short of murderous. In no time at all,
you’re enveloped...to listen is like being suffocated alive. The
resonating frequencies start to throb and vibrate right inside your
skull, and are physically demanding (at times painful even) to listen
to. Each one is edited to last precisely 19:33 each, and are generated
using varying frequencies of kilohertz. You get a full spectrum of deep
and high ranges of noise, forming into vibrant, invasive missiles of
dronery that embed themselves in your cranium and manipulate the
electronic signals of your brain, Whether this will have a benign result
or a malignant one, only time will tell...composer devoutly wishes for
the former, though. |
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