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Rating: This album emerges from the post-MARS era of Sumner Crane, the voice and guitar of the No Wave band originally founded in NY in 1975 as CHINA.
We stand before a sort of musical experiment, produced in the form of a 14-episode operetta inspired by Mozart's Don Giovanni.
It's pure revolution just as it was, obviously under different premises, the one enacted at the end of the 18th century. Here the revolt, or rather the operation, materializes by calling upon the intelligentsia of NO WAVE: Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori from DNA along with Duncan Lindsay (Arto's brother), Mark Cunningham and China Burg from MARS.
Guitar-piano-percussion-cello-horn-clarinet-voice... the scene is an ode to madness. The result is a work completely outside any framework.
The role of Gavanti is led by Sumner Crane who wakes up in his stone bed... sails first to Argentina, where he finds himself outside a nightclub... the return to NY aboard a ship... him at St. Marks Place where he transforms himself into a young boy... guides a lady up the mountain... he leads an expedition in Africa... the yearning Velvira asks the mirror where her Gavanti is and the mirror replies... in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs... the statue of a white soldier... the run along the streets... then with an old lady aboard the ship towards home. Perhaps no one has ever dared so much before, ever had the courage to go beyond.
The immediate reference is MARS, their devastating-paranoid-morbid-obsessive progression in noise. The improvisation here however takes on a more visionary and above all ironic connotation, less violent compared to MARS, typically -DADAIST- in the strict sense of the intention.
It is provocation-trap-illusion-deception; mixing the cards extremely quickly, tracing a furrow with subtle and perverse pleasure... Just as the master Marcel Duchamp played with musical notes drawn randomly from a hat, Sumner Crane defines this neo-erratum magnificently projecting into the future and becomes the ideal bridging point between the No Wave of late '70s/early '80s and the new millennium.
The music transcends MARS into a devastated but free free-noise-jazz-blues directly into the dark side of the Big Apple. The atonal singing of Sumner Crane molds itself in its own dissonance and rhythm of one of the most brilliant and unlistenable insights of music ever produced. The proposal, for many -indecent and absurd-, is a non-music that defines and traces what would later be picked up in more recent times by artists like John Zorn.
Apart from MARS, I really feel like associating John Zorn with this avant-garde rich in deviant spirituality which I find at times in the Naked City project of "Torture Garden".
The structure is simple yet studied, paradoxical to the same degree, in a few words beyond time and space. It's sonic terrorism, difficult to digest and understand if you don't come from the territories defined by the seminal -NO NEW YORK- and the groups produced therein under the aegis of the non-musician BRIAN ENO. An improbable experience without the aid of the speed of living. As a pure object of affection, I recommend the vinyl fetish-record released in 1980 in 3000 copies by Hyrax rather than the cold CD reissue by Atavistic in 1998.
In any case, it's a listening experience that leaves a mark on existence.
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