Reizenstein / Jones - Reizenstein - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Jones / Chicago Sym Orch - At the Exactest Point [COMPACT DISCS] date 11/23/2004

Soisong is the stunning but short-lived partnership of Coil co-founder Peter InchSleazyInch Christopherson and veteran Russian electronic experimentalist Ivan Pavlov. Though friends since 1997, the project birthed roughly a decade later in Bangkok, where Christopherson relocated following the death of his Coil collaborator John Balance in 2004. Named after the Thai word for 'two' along with a notorious red-light district street nearby, the duo dialed into a cryptic language of lurching synthetics, Eastern minimalism, and interdimensional glitch, oscillating between elegance and mayhem. qXn948s collects some of their earliest recordings, and remains as transgressive and transcendent a listen now as it was upon it's a decade and a half ago. Pavlov characterizes Soisong as less a musical group than a Inchutopian, semi-alien for collaboration, devoid of pronounced personality or centralized authority... more like a message from elsewhere that anyone is welcome to participate in and spread.Inch Every facet of the project was disruptive and oblique self-released CDs packaged in elaborate origami that had to be destroyed to be accessed; a website with password protected sections, where different passwords were provided for different events, objects or releases; performance merchandise of headphones and a Walkman melted shut so the music can only be heard as long as the set of batteries last. Theirs was a muse as unprecedented as it was uncompromising, equal parts pranks and profundity. 'qXn948s' began with samples and software composed intuitively in tandem before a large monitor, then progressively processed and scrambled into bewildering arrangements of digital frequencies, alternately spartan and claustrophobic, uneasy and uncanny. Vignettes of small melody emerge and are obliterated; gamelan-esque tones spiral above cybernetic pulse programming and funereal didgerid

The Mirror, a play by Isaac Bashevis Singer, explores the interior life of a Jewish woman living in a small eastern European town. The surrealistic plot mixes themes of sexual repression and fantasy, presided over by a demon who haunts the woman' mirror.