The Biophonic Boombox Recordings

構成数 : 2枚
合計収録時間 : 02:36:23
The Nightcrawlers were a Philadelphia-based trio who played a home-grown variation on Berlin School electronic music, taking major inspiration from artists like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. They were active from 1980 until 1991, and they gigged and recorded incessantly, but only produced three studio albums. This was because the group disliked spending endless hours in the studio, properly composing pieces and running through them countless times until they sounded perfect, then going through the laborious process of mixing everything down. They much preferred to improvise and record their spontaneous recording sessions directly onto tape using a boombox. They released over three-dozen cassettes of these sessions, as well as solo material and side projects. According to one of the group's members, they might've reached more ears with their cassette releases than their LPs, and their recordings found their way across the world, particularly to Germany. While some of the group's studio recordings made it to compact disc via the 1997 compilation Traveling Backwards, The Biophonic Boombox Recordings is the first release to sum up the Nightcrawlers' extensive catalog of cassettes. The majority of these tracks are over ten minutes each, and they all seem to be excerpts from much longer sessions. The musicians steadily build layers, changing sequences and playing melodies in real time. While the musicians are obviously highly skilled, their work displays much more of a zeal for figuring out what their machines can do in the moment rather than striving toward technical proficiency. Given the rudimentary recording equipment, it all sounds very lo-fi, and the sounds of the instruments being operated, creaking chairs, studio chatter, and coughs are audible. For the most part, these recordings tend to emphasize hypnotic rhythms, so they're easy to get caught up inside. There are a few moments when they genuinely space out, such as "Zeitgeber," which gradually sheds its already minimal pulse and ends up with an extended passage of faint whistling and cricket chirping. Much of this music does tend to sound like basement demos for Phaedra or Oxygene, but even more than that, it's a solid link between the formative era of cosmic electronic exploration and artists such as Emeralds, Forma, and S U R V I V E who continued venturing down that path during the 21st century. ~ Paul Simpson