Dean Roberts
All Cracked Medias

Life never ceases to amaze me!

"The New Zealand guitarist/experimenter Dean Roberts is credited with ‘All Cracked Medias’, 1998, a masterpiece of late-century avant-garde. Roberts has spent half his career documenting on record the very process of musical creation, according to a philosophy of sound that has as its reference the randomness of John Cage. But, like many recent avant-garde leaders, he could not avoid the confrontation with the recovery of pure acoustic sound."

What amazes me? The fact that I found the aforementioned summa of the figure of composer Dean Roberts in Corriere della Sera! No, you didn't read wrong, right in the most important Italian newspaper, they talk about this character I thought I was following alone along with some other hallucinated people around the world through magazines or sad fanzines... 

It's hard to recover from this positive shock, but it's also difficult to find a more important composition in the history of avant-garde music than the 26 minutes of "Kompakt Arcade" that opens this album. It encompasses within itself all the reasons for an album but also for an entire movement where you can hear the influences of the research conducted by Brian Eno and even a vague artistic taste of the so-called Land Art.
The album could have closed right here, for the experimental strength and for the bewildering impact it has on the listener, but "Moving Chairs" - a title I find fascinating like few others - still leaves space for interesting ideas and research.

Very complex, or perhaps a test of patience, to reach the conclusion of the album, maybe a milestone to crown with a sigh of relief but it's worth it. I must be honest, I have never listened to the three songs (?!!?) consecutively and for this very reason, I do not recommend you undertake this exercise, except as a personal battle against the musical world, but rather let these noises, barely perceptible electronic and electrical splinters, enter your daily life only when you are predisposed in spirit.
Some time ago I was influenced by those who considered an album like this an absolute masterpiece, not that it isn't, actually, perhaps it represents along with a few others a symbolic album of a certain avant-garde, but it would be false to say that it doesn't represent a challenging listening experience. Difficult to recommend to friends who, with a malevolent grin, might then ring your doorbell and invite you to put this CD where the sun never shines, hard to lie even to those reading these lines, but difficult also not to recognize that not knowing of its existence would be a non-negligible ignorance.

At home, I see this CD in the shelves with both esteem and fear at the same time, as if telepathically speaking to it: "I know who you are and what you contain, you were taken out 4-5 times from the dust of time and you amazed me, struck me, annoyed me, fascinated me, but when you return to the shelf - oh my dear CD - don’t be angry, I am calmer because I know I will listen to you again in some time where, let’s not deny it, you will represent the best album of life."

For a few unforgettable moments...