Tuxedomoon
Desire

THE REVIEW

Another little gem from 1980s California. After X, this week we move from Los Angeles to San Francisco. We are in 1981, but the first thing that comes to mind when re-listening to "Desire" is the "Time out of joint" (quoting Dick) of this work. Which, by the way, and forgive me if I digress, is a bit of the feeling that all the best new wave instills in us. Like a fracture of the space-time canons we are accustomed to. Even after so many years, the best records of that era seem always untimely, as if projected from another world, original and yet with less influence in the years to come than many '60s and '70s bands had. Have you ever read a review where someone said: "These guys sound like Tuxedomoon" or someone cited them as their influence? Yet, I believe that everyone who has had the fortune to listen to them still carries them in their heart.

So what exactly do Tuxedomoon sound like? Oblique music. Elusive. Fascinating.

The electronic drums set the pace along with a deep bass, circular patterns rarely heard before (perhaps in Can). Onto this base, sometimes a cello, very often a sax, is added. Winstong Tong's disquieting voice recites litanies more than sings: in "Victims Of The Dance" it sounds like that of a drunkard, in other tracks like a David Bowie on acid. The keyboards wrap everything, but if at times they are liquid and "non-New Yorkish", other times they seem relentless and inhuman (I would use the neologism "disnumanizzate"), other times still they dive into reiteration to such an extent that the mind cannot help but run to Philip Glass.

Summing it all up, what does it result in? It might certainly be a gamble, but try to imagine Maurice Ravel captured by a spaceship, taken to some distant planet and released a few months later with a Casio keyboard as a souvenir. Tuxedomoon's music in "Desire", which is a transition from the geometric electronics of the first album "Half Mute" to the acoustic of certain later works like "Suite En Sous-Soul", manages to blend electronic and acoustic elements, avant-garde and classical, American Fordist industrial scenarios and early 20th-century European decadence, as I believe few others have managed to do in the last thirty years.

The album's title, particularly fitting, since Tuxedomoon's music appears to be suspended at a point and in a moment that is nothing but waiting and desire, invites me to formulate one: will it ever be possible to see a movie based on a work by Dick with Tuxedomoon's soundtrack? It would be fantastic.

Just to bore you, but I promise I won't review them all, this is also in the hundred albums I would save from the universal flood.