NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS : 15 November 1986
NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS : 15 November 1986
When Western popular culture wears itself threadbare, it traditionally
patches gaping holes in its consciousness with oriental or "primitive"
cloth. From the Beatles through Japan and the Cocteau Twins, the results
are usually as messy as a hippy's jeans - so rare is the occurrence of
a genuine cultural interweave.
They propagate their crossfertilisations in the digital sampler, here
deployed as a time machine. Seemingly programmed with a history of world
musics, SPK's Graeme Revell subsequently cuts up and reshuffles the time
continuum, settling down "living" and "dead" civilisations side by side.
Antique industrial noises are fused with the emerging percussion musics
of Africa, Bali and New Guinea. A dialogue is achieved between Northern
and Southern hemisphere choirs and orchestration, awakening in the listener's
genetic memory the sense that life contains within it manifestations of
the ancestral, the living and the unborn
At the very least it all ads up to an ambient music of unparallelled
vitality - the contradiction is intended. Where others define ambience
as dust particles hovering in air, SPK pluck from it ghost voices of the
past and percolate them through the rootless, shifting present.
SPK once predicted a forbidding new dark age. With this record they
signal the coming dawn.
