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Emerging from out of an era where Electronic Musicians were considered mere technicians experimenting with the transmission of sound, we find our Philadelphia-based innovators The Ghostwriters. Hearing their compositions today we find that collaborators Jeff Cain & Charles Cohen made New Music that still sounds new. A sophisticated, idiosyncratic construction, with tricky rhythmical layering and semi-impressionistic harmonies, their 1981 LP Objects In Mirrors Are Closer Than They Appear (39:02) is much too playful to be thought of as "Avant-Garde". Unfolding on a scale between classical narrative and radical form it piles unstable harmonies on top of a fractured foundation - bulging at the seams with influences and ideas. Across its eight tracks this album gets souped-up then stripped down, the duo's silvery charisma fueled by chaotic energies rising within. The lesson learned, or remembered, is that thinking is the work of the listener... From the quietly magnetic to the starkly vacant, then swerving toward a vivid land of Nod the 1986 cassette Remote Dreaming (62:09) ventured inside a sensibility of soothing, and placed us on more companionable ground. Over the thirteen tracks we realize that the boundaries between conventional and unconventional have always been porous for these two musicians. But for this release this pair move beyond a learned technical command to a more personal involvement with the music, without disrupting its prettiness in the least. Expressing something fragile their mesmerizing sonic shadows suggest how sounds may have the ability to alter our being. The harmonic, sonic language observes newness and strangeness in a rare edge-of-the-world terrain, as many small moments, movements and aspirations blossom into meaning... And now, 40 plus years after their initial release, this duplet of reissues show what was foreordained, but not foreseen - reminding us that at one time New Music and Art was important, had meaning, and warned that we were coming into sight of a New World - and so should still our minds, and listen.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 7 November 2024 |
