Recording: Contact

Artist: Contact

Song: Discreet Music (composer: Brian Eno)

Recorded at The Music Gallery ("Ambient²: The Music of Brian Eno"), September 2, 2012.

Contact - Discreet Music [excerpt]

Contact - Discreet Music [MFS Layers of Indeterminacy re-version]

Full review to follow. A lovely performance from Contact, re-arranging and extending Eno's stately decaying tape loops for live instrumentation. (Keep an eye out next year for a studio recording of their arrangement.) Interestingly, stretching the performance out to an hour brought to mind nothing so much as the work of Gavin Bryars (who was Eno's collaborator on the original album's flipside Pachelbel deconstructions) as suddenly one became attuned to minor variations in the long recurring loops of the piece's structure.

The Eno-esque approach is always to treat sonic elements as so much malleable stuff, so it was hard to resist the urge to play around with this recording a little bit. One could spend days tinkering, but here I have a rather quickly-conceived re-fashioning of the Contact performance that features several sections of the performance layered to play simultaneously, allowing "accidental" synchronicities to emerge.