Kevin Shea, Adam Sonderberg, and Dan Warburton - Folktales No. 3
(Crouton)
The Crouton label's commitment to releasing art as music is remarkable; through fifteen releases they've released original music with beautiful packaging, continually proposing challenging ideas to their artists. The Folktales series is designed "to explore the literary aspects of sound and performance"; each release has three 3" CDs, each by a solo artist, accompanied by a short text. This third release in the series is packaged identically to the first two, though a different color - it's quite nifty, though impossible to fit on my CD shelf. The text, written collectively by the three artists, is an abstract poem, brief enough that I could quote it in its entirety, though I won't. Dan Warburton's disc is processed violin, rather quiet at times but sometimes exploding in a surreal Earth Trumpet-esque manner. Adam Sonderberg's work, "I Just Want To Make Sure That We Have the Context Correct Here", is probably the most striking - I think it was composed entirely on a computer, though the liner notes don't specify. Beginning with a long, minimal electronic pulse, the piece explodes into a cascade of drumming and piercing electronics before dropping out suddenly. The remainder of the disc is about 10 minutes of quiet static and rumbling. A handful of people are credited with "research and development" but their exact roles are not known. Kevin Shea, always the only redeemable member of Storm and Stress (in this writer's opinion), layers a goofy spoken track over solo drumming for about fifteen minutes before some processed/reversed sounds come in. It's not the most compelling thing I've ever heard - while Shea is a fantastic drummer, the piece loses my interest. The ending is somewhat pleasant, though I don't really feel that the relation to the spoken part was expressed clearly. At about an hour between the three discs, many might wonder why this wasn't just a three-way split CD instead of a triple 3" set. But the medium is the message, and the fine folks at Crouton, clearly, understand that better than almost any other label.
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