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| Explore The Outer Realms Of Music With Random Touch by Glass Onyon PR Last year's pioneering effort from American experimental ensemble Random Touch, aptly titled Alchemy, was a journey inward to that place where the music controls the artist. Now Random Touch has gone further than they've gone before with the release of A True Conductor Wears A Man - a comprehensive study in improvisational composition and arrangement. Once again, the music controls the conductor. "We start off listening closely to each other and ourselves, and on our best pieces this is a stepping stone to a state where we can no longer distinguish what is our own and what is another's. The aggregate music becomes a unified, monolithic thing, and it becomes entirely unclear whether we are hammering upon it, surfing atop it, or are simply at one with it. For myself this last step often morphs into a state where the music itself becomes secondary to a dream-like emotional drama, replete with visuals behind my lidded eyes. The joy of this experience is second only to sex. " Christopher Brown, drummer "Sometimes I listen to something we did, and it seems completely independent of me; I can't begin to know how we made it." James Day, keyboardist "Unlike traditional musicians who seek to hone their skills to a point of utter control, we veer away when technique would make us too predictable. We know we need freshness and a sense of fun, and our pursuit of these inevitably leads to using instruments, genres and every day objects in ways that were never intended. When we play we don't know where we are going or how we are getting there. Discovering the answers to these questions, in real time, is pure musical joy." Christopher Brown You can sense the spirit of Can, of Zappa, of Angelo Badalamenti, but the music of Random Touch lies outside of simple categories or comparisons. Their music appears sourced from the mythic plane where the collective consciousness of the whole and individual unconscious become one. The result is dreamy, hypnotic, and otherworldly; it is music that seems to float, free of gravity, continuously on the verge of cohesion and collapse. "We have this amazing trust between us. It opens up all these doors." James Day "That trust, that openness, is very inviting. It allows something bigger than us to come and play." Christopher Brown Random Touch founders Christopher Brown and James Day have an old and synergistic relationship that began with collaborations in high school (an original rock opera) and college (commissioned multi-media piece Broken Glass among others). Brown and Day first collaborated with member Scott Hamill (guitar) in 1978 and member Matthew Ebbin (camera) in 1998. In addition to music, the visual arts have been an integral part of their work over the years. To Random Touch they are all vibration. Whether videotaping the tight, electric frequency of the color violet or recording the long and lazy thrum of a hammered steel girder, it is all raw material, ready for the alchemy of transmutation. On October 21, 2007 their eighth work, A True Conductor Wears a Man, will be released. A journey through beauty, tension and darkness awaits the listener. Some may consider the 54 minutes CD even more wild and untamed than its predecessors. Listen as Scott Hamill, James Day and Christopher Brown converge once again to explore and flesh out the unfamiliar. "The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves." Black Elk, Oglala Sioux write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Jazz News :: home page |