Label: Staalplaat Format: CD
Originally released in 1993, The Grand Delusion takes as its themes the very idea of the American nation as a construct of media and cultural signifiers, especially as contextualised by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent events of the Gulf War. As a work of what The Tape-beatles mockingly trademark as Plagiarism®, the record also served as the soundtrack to their triple-screen 16mm film presentation of the same name, and brims with energetic venom directed at the powers that be in what was establishing itself as the dominant world military and economic force at the time of its recording.
As the title indicates, every opportunity to shred the braggadocio and self-aggrandising statements of Americas politicians and their partners in cultural control is taken with multi-media assault and battery in mind. Sometimes the sample choices are a tad surreal – “Frog Story”, which plays with an apparently scientific voiceover which is describing the inability to drop a frog in boiling water for example. “Home Problems” makes a stinging noise assault on the blathering pontifications on family life from some TV evangelist or politician (the difference is quite often hard to discern), layering echoed shouts and statements over a roiling base of tabla samples and hyperspeed percussion. “Flowers For Dead Horses” uses an Arabic singer and news story descriptions of the devastation inflicted on Iraq to undercut the speechifying declarations of America’s peace-loving nature and the evils of Saddam Hussein before dissolving into tape-wrenched murk and a dismal sense of ire.
Musically, tracks can get pretty frenetic in their looping, verging into the realms of breakbeat and sub-bass from time to time but without being especially Junglist or HipHop along the way, with excursions into sampladelic Romanticism, lounging loops and symphonic cut & paste. Stop-start disorientation is generally the method, and the whirl of soundbites from a century of broadcasting take the war from the screen and back to the likes of Bush, Reagan and that old warmonger and prominent Americanophile Winston Churchill. Still, calling a loping virtual Jazz smoocher which thrusts semiotic theory into the demands for conflict “Chilling”, while relating to one of the samples therein also shows a fine sense of irony, and when “Candidate” quotes from a psychiatric dialogue seemingly asking the listener to undertake treatment for amnesia and unheeding somnambulism, The Tape-Beatles are really pushing the point home, and then finishing the album with a flurry of sampled “Also Spräch Zarathustra”, a piece which has almost become an anthem to (American) technological prowess thanks to 2001.
As a bonus, the CD is repackaged with twenty minutes of material from the same sessions, oddly entitled “15′ Minutes In Search Of Peace”, as a coda to and recapitulation of the original album – appropriate given its subtitle Synthety No.3. These pieces are perhaps even more disorienting in their collages of rhythm and spatchcocked samba symphonics, and verge from the mockingly stirring to the stutteringly down-home and regurgitively noisy. The Grand Delusion is really quite a heavy listen sometimes, as befits its subject, but stands up substantially in its own right as a landmark of plunderphonics too.
-Antron S. Meister-
