Michael Stearns Sustaining Cylinders

Compact Disc / 2 tracks / 61.09 mins

The title track 'Sustaining Cylinders' sounds fairly electronic but was in fact created with a special 20 tone set of vibes. Michael strikes the vibes but the actual sound of the strike is not recorded only the decay of the tone. These tones were then slowed down on an analogue tape recorder. So what you get is thirty minutes of these tones overlaid, one or more coming as the previous tone or group of tones were fading. Michael says that the track was not designed to play as music but rather 'as textural meditative backgrounds, as sonic context for personal explorations'. For those people who know what on Earth this means good for you, you might like this CD. Unfortunately my view of it is that it is meaningless New Age codswallop. There is even a hint in the booklet that it has something in common with homeopathic medicines. Of course it has Malcolm.

And it gets better. The second track 'Sleeping Conches' was performed almost entirely on kitchen pots and pans. The beautiful tones were then slowed down and processed. These wondrous sounds were then mixed with some recordings of the ocean- waves breaking that sort of thing. Again the track goes on for over half an hour. It has to be said that these tracks were some of Michael's earliest pieces and as an experiment in manipulating sound I am sure that it was a very useful exercise as well as an interesting thing to do. I am however very dubious about the whole 'ambient' concept (though do like some CDs that are labelled as such) and releases like this do nothing to convince me that there is any point in buying such a CD. Surely just getting a wind chime and opening the window would not work out any more expensive and yet you would get a different listening experience every night. Yippee. (DL)

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