Friday, October 26, 2012

#635 Philip Glass - North Star

It's important to give albums their due respect and to try to take the on the terms they present, but holy shit is this boring. Just downright annoying. High art I guess, maybe, but just unlistenable. The exceptions are the organ tracks, which get a nice warm sound with subtleties in the crannies that somewhat justify the repetition. Ik-ook, in particular, is propulsive and satisfying and presents interesting ways of hearing via its segmentations of its repetitions.

As I just mentioned, Glass does repetition. That's kind of his thing around this time. Some call it minimalism (referring to composition not to sound), and that's fine. The problem isn't even necessarily in the minimal compositions, its the actual sounds from which the songs are composed: in so many cases their actual tone isn't pleasant, ringing slightly dissonant. This is maybe revolutionary work as far as synthesizers, but they just sound bad. Listening to something bad again and again isn't good.

Important, maybe. but only listen if you feel like you need to eat your cultural vegetables 1.5/5

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