DUAL; Destroy All Improv
DUAL – Destroy All Improv
Ed Chang [electronics] – Doug Theriault [guitar]
Toast & Jam Recordings t & j 014
Duration: 61:19
http://www.tandjrec.com
Ed Chang and Doug Theriault deliver a CDR that is bound to cut shreds and slices out of your ordinary senses and implant a wildman’s wild thoughts and dreams in your mindscape, as they dip into treacherous currents of contemporeana: This is New York City April, and it couldn’t be fresher. I don’t believe my son over in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, will have this influence him, but I kind of wish it would; we all need some insanity vitamins now and then, and these guys spread the honest stuff far and wide, in a jagged pattern, between the Now and the Then, making Easy a little Tough, which is healthy, yes, healthy and wholesome.
The label issues this information about DUAL:
|
DUAL is Doug Theriault on guitar and Ed Chang on electronics. DUAL's music is about the tension, release, destruction, resurrection and intersection of sound-objects in space. And kung fu, lots of kung fu. Listen. And Learn. Enjoy the Magic.
Chris says: Imagine Merzbow, Photek, Aphex Twin & Van Halen in a blender then multiply that by 15 million!
|
|
Sure enough – but I hear other guys in there too, if we must compare, like for instance the formidable desperation of John Zorn, thinking especially about the corrugation of a CD like Spy vs. Spy from 1989, and I hear Rotcod Zzaj and his accomplices, as well as Jeff Kaiser and Chris Forsyth. These DUAL guys are probably much younger than those aforementioned, and I’m sort of happy to hear a couple of guys who’ve restored the right kind of panic! This is good stuff for forlorn ears and used-to-it-all souls, because if you let the content of Destroy All Improv invade the crevasses of your thought forms, your shattered thoughts and disrupted feelings will paint numerous in-the-skull masterpieces – so be it! This is not just improviation and haphazard electronics. This soars in the domain of modern art music. Tough luck if you can get it!
The label also gives this information about itself:
|
In 1999 Toast and Jam recordings was created by Alex Norman and Daniel Dannenberg. Dan has since left but in 2002 Chris Jones joined up with T and J. We distribute original music in the CDR format. We created Toast and Jam to release our own music as well as music by other people we enjoy. Toast and jam makes no money, We like the CDR format because it allows us to have a lot of releases available without being a financial burden. In fact, for this reason we prefer CDRs to any other format. Most of our releases have been electronic, ambient and/or experimental but we aren't necessarily confining ourselves to that, we are open to all sorts of interesting music. In October 2003 Ted Laderas joined up as TandJ's booking agent.
|
|
The beautiful cover – a latter day revolution enigma! – brings joy to an old fart like myself who’s been around a Europe where The Baader-Meinhof network blew up banks in the 1970s in a gesture of political poetry, but I suppose DUAL’s cover refers more to latter day world trade organization resistance and anti-globalization. Nonetheless, the cover and the music harmonize, both coming across in outrage and spiraling destruction of values that serve us no more, right?
The music – often cut-up, shredded, poured out like gravel into the machinery of night – manages to make a lasting impression of feverish zeal, unforgiving efforts and also of a love of universal justice which hovers over all these forcefully desperate moves.
I hear a star-crushing machine at the edge of the Horizon of Events, sucking the matter of contemporary society into its unappeasable void, beyond which the black hole of Truth compresses the plans and dirty looks of the powerful into a singularity which looses all meaning, all here and now, perhaps to seep out into another dimension through the gentle activities of Quantum Mechanics at Planck length dimensions; who knows!
Some of the titles of the short tracks may supply some ins on the workings of the minds of these relentless but very talented artists. Let’s ponder the significance of titles like Sin Is Plenty, Shredded Truths, Topography of My Rectum, Rebuilding Destruction, Molotov Cocktail the Rich and so forth. Crude poetry of today, one might say. Sure! I’m glad every time I hear young people with the will and power to let the power and strength of frustration take shape in art and music; we need these young prophets more than ever!
|
|
