Anthony Moore - 1971 - Reed, Whistle And Sticks

Anthony Moore

1971

Reed, Whistle And Sticks

01. Red Now I Wonder, Part 1 18:30
02. Red Now I Wonder, Part 2 20:00

Composed By – Anthony Moore

Consists of a single piece split into 99 tracks. Recorded in 1972, consisting mainly of tape loops of recordings of bamboo sticks dropped onto various surfaces.

There seems to be some kind of glitch in the mastering of this CD (possibly intentional given the theory and structure of the piece, as detailed in the composer's liner notes). When the disc is played from the beginning, it gets to track 60 and plays partway through the track (to 0:24) and then starts at the beginning of track 60, entering a playback loop which will not end until you either stop playback or use the back button to skip back to the beginning of the track and play from that point, at which point the disc will play through to the end as expected. This same playback issue occurred in two separate copies of the CD which I purchased (I returned the first one and kept the second, assuming it would only happen again if I sought out a third copy). The funny thing is that the first time this happened I didn't even notice it until the track had been repeating for probably dozens of times, because the sound material is so chaotic and unpredictable that it is virtually impossible to hear and remember a pattern in a 24-second section of that particular track. Has anyone else had this issue? My disc player isn't acting strangely with any of the other hundreds of CDs in my collection. The only way I can play this recording all the way through from start to finish without interruption is to listen to the digital files I ripped of the CD on my computer.

This highly experimental work represents some early sound collages from this quirky British composer. Affiliated with the avant rock group Henry Cow, Anthony Moore's works are highly regarded in the experimental music scene thanks to his Flying Doesn't Help album from 1978, a cult masterpiece of avant rock which enjoyed a much higher profile in the underground than his debut. This could be attested to the abstract nature of this recording, which explored tape-loop repetitions that build slow-phase patterns in the style of Terry Riley. Reed Whistle & Sticks is a study of ambient noise made by recording the surfaces of wood, glass, cloth, metal, and plastic. The composer then took piles of bamboo sticks and proceeded to drop the raining bundles on the varying surfaces, resulting in a random pitter-patter of raining noise. When Moore transformed these recordings into tape loops, the cascades of this noise become stunningly musical.

This is a brilliantly unpredictable piece of music that somehow arrives at a meeting ground between John Cage's aleatoric music and the completely improvisational expressions of AMM and artists of that ilk, a piece that uniquely situates itself in the realm of recorded work, neither composition nor performance per se. Probably the most chaotic and disruptive ambient music you will ever listen to.