The group responsible for last year’s (rather excellent) Noise Of Art CD continue their no melody, no rhythm, no harmony ethos with this release that documents the carrion buzz of thirteen alternating radio sets, vintage ones dating from between 1935 and 1961.
This is a recording that romances the pirouetting static that lies between the consumable, unwanted, unloved, often the servant to convert activity, here celebrated in a hands-on seventy-two minute performance by the Opening Performance Orchestra.
Based on John Cage‘s Radio Music, their take on the piece is a grainy adventure in which the atmospheric whirr of unseen forces and rippling halflings pull across and rip into the valvic smears that copter the abrasive assault. There is a razored edge to the sounds here that dances with burrowing interference, raspberry-ripples in dirty resistance. There is the odd radio programme discernably surfacing low in the mix, throwing out muddy operatics and torn-up adverts that sink back just as quickly to that maggoty anti-melody that renders the silence that follows it so super-loud.Radio Music Extended is a release that out avant-gardes the avant-garde.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
