Opening Performance Orchestra – Chess Show (Other Memories Of John Cage)

NEOS

Opening Performance Orchestra - Chess ShowWhat an exciting listen — that creeping tension weaving the fragments is ace — a stretchy saturate for all that delicious atonal action to dance in divergent colour and sparing tuning.

The surging symmetry of all those haunting little details jostling for your attention, somewhere a drunken Kurt Schwitters stumbles into a squabbling Punch and Judy, stapled in an uneven measure of ulcerated piano. The drama is everywhere, leaking in toy-like clanks and strangulated sonics, pepper-spraying Brothers Quay-like mumblings that poke a stick around your subconscious.

Eight tracks at  eight minutes each, sixty-four minutes each, echoing the sixty-four squares of the chess board, and its eight rows and eight-column structure, each square firing a randomised fragment of John Cage. Antonin Artaud accents bubbling tramp-like to a detuned grate and splattering of keys, those cavernous volcanics of piano inners suddenly illuminating the headspace with heavy debris.

The shoplifted patchwork gives your speakers a real workout, a mauling mooch finding a strange union to noisily explode. Sparks of sudden laughter flutter as a discoloured tune waves its tattered arms to wither on some sustained ectoplasm. Warbling gong-like oscillations, rubbing into the kick-start whorl of a dynamo to dialogue exit the silence.

The second disc (which I think is the studio version) is more orchestrated, silvery. A dronic underbelly gluing all the sketchiness together. Think I’m loving this the most, a pharmaceutically dosed unease cut into by sweeping tailwinds and some insanely manic moments that textually tear.

A kinetic complexity whose knotty detunes circumspect, finds a typewriting William Burroughs and cracking whips, then parachute-lands into a rumbling rebellion. An absolute ton of details that leap-light your senses, ending on a mulched keyboard’s squelch.

Another triumph from the Opening Performance Orchestra that injures your imagination good and proper.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-

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