A
look at the head-note will alert you to Gary Noland’s
very personal way with words. Not for Noland the lures
either
of Olympian detachment or lower case “significance.” No,
Noland is full-on and takes few linguistic prisoners.
Similarly with the booklet artwork, Noland’s own, which
is an example of crazed Robert Crumb à L’Africaine. And
his music is much the same, Deformed Fugue, his
1977 piece for harpsichord summoning up pretty nicely
his compositional stance. This is an elixir brewed of
Couperin
and Rameau, Scott Joplin, Bach, free funk, free Jazz
(Cecil Taylor?), the Fugue, and an unholy alliance of
straight
sounding neo-classicism and its subsequent assault by
the forces of percussive militancy.
Noland
may actually be a romantic but doesn’t want you to know.
His Prelude is baroque-convincing though attended
by some sour-ish off notes but he follows it with Serial
Lullaby, a synthesiser-rich free funk piece that
mocks its own title. Spray Taint gives us assaulted
baroque, the percussion blizzards full of jazz offbeat
and whoop-bang
noises (plus telephone rings and disco inferno). He subjects
Ragtime to the same souring procedures as he does to
his off-note harpsichord baroque and evokes a drugs fix
(in My
Babe’s Gone Down To Do Her Glue) with some haywire
free form. He writes a American fanfare for the title
track and subjects it to anti-Bush assault by bird song
and drum blister.
His
quixotic sense extends to opus numbers – the bowels of
Op.80 are scattered throughout the disc, and to instrumentation
as well. I assume he makes all the noises, both pianistic
and harpsichord synthesised and vocalised. He’s a veritable
one-man band of off-kilter influences, the procedural
repetition of which sometimes got me seriously down,
though I did
like his Swingle Sisters take-off on Music is Dead:
A Paradox in Fugue.
Jonathan Woolf