TR-i
No World Order

This album has sixteen covers, one for each track. No, not sixteen versions of the CD, each with a different cover, but an album with sixteen covers all part of the booklet, of which only one is visible from the outside, while the booklet, instead of lyrics or anything else, presents fifteen more covers, all complete with graphics showing the album title and artist's name. The artist, TR-i, appears to be a kind of visionary (in some of the aforementioned covers, he even has a mad scientist look), an expert in sound technology and computer science. In those years (we are in '92), he founded PatroNat, a software and consultancy company in the field, and according to him, this concept, more and even better than being a musical CD with its tracks and moments, is an encyclopedia of sounds, all made available to those who want to manipulate them, reproduce them, plagiarize them. The project was accompanied by a little program to disrupt tracks, distort them, remix them, sample fragments from them... No, let's not laugh: we are sixteen (like the covers) years back.

Before embarking on (and it's really the case to say so) listening, comes another singularity: the tracklist includes three "Worldwide Epiphany," two title tracks, three "Time Stood Still" and a pair of "Love Thing"...

Once the listening mission is accomplished, there are no doubts: starting from what I'd say is an excellent musical knowledge, TR-i amplifies all his intuitions to the maximum useful extent and simultaneously displays all his knowledge in the "sound sector." He deals with black music, rap, spoken word also performed, sings like a rocker, like a soul artist... Many tracks are very fast, but this kind of Zichichi of music finds them long enough to precede them with one or even more preludes, which, naturally, have nothing to do with the track-jingle they're attached to. But, as mentioned, everything was not prepared for the "any" listener, but rather for the technician, the programmer, the DJ, the avant-gardist at all costs, the young "self-taught apprentice" who until then didn't know he had a master...

The tracks, among themselves, are almost never disconnected; some have preludes and/or interludes that correspond to scraps, loops or even refrains from previous tracks, if not even following ones. In life, I do not try to create antimatter, and among various hobbies, I amuse myself (I amuse others less) by listening and reviewing music, so I don’t care at all about knowing how, when, and why this album is or isn’t perfect from a technical-scientific point of view. As a simple listener, I say there are wonderful ideas, spectacular sounds, masterful executions of things that too often cannot be defined as songs. And that cannot be defined at all. If not, maybe, remnants.

The author of this experiment, however, well knew what, of this "No World Order," would be digestible for the "man on the street": this is shown by the fact that the following year a "lite" version will be released. With another cover. The seventeenth.