TOP : October 1994
Another important artist with whom few will be familiar is ADOLF WOLFLI,
an "Outsider" painter and musician who died in 1930 leaving behind a huge
legacy of peculiar dreamscape illustrations and musical scores that foiled
all who came into contact with them. With "Outsider Art" enjoying some
kind of 90s renaissance, it seems only fitting that one of the movement's
founding fathers gets the attention he deserved, but never got it, in life.
Former SPK player Graham Revell gets as close to the spirit of Wolfli as
possible by releasing his Musique Brut Collection (Mute), half of
which is devoted to the man's sensitive, almost supernatural compositions
which haunt the memory with their spectral power. The rest is taken up
with Revell's experiments with insect sounds. On 'The Insect Musicians'
Revell plugs into the chittering, squeaking and sawing of legs, wings and
mandibles to produce a music that delves deep into an invisible world of
music that is literally under our feet. Bees drone, crickets make mating
calls, flies hover from speaker to speaker like helicopters, and the orchestration
of these creatures by Revell is absorbing and slightly disturbing. Sometimes
the marriage between bug and computer console grates badly, but at its
peak 'The Insect Musicians' is one huge buzz.
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