Sequences

Sequences #22, August 1999

Nick Rothwell's music is seriously serious, composed largely for live performance to accompany dance pieces, and recorded in the depths of Scotland in 1996.

This release on US label Atomic City is presented in a pretty stark manner - a moody cover pic of two dancers, no equipment list and little explanation of the purpose behind each track - in fact the sleeve notes state "there is music for listening to, and music for moving to. You are free to decide which is which".

So all we know is that "no digital samplers were used on this album", and (judging purely from the sleeve photo) that somewhere the Buchla Thunder, an alternative MIDI controller, and a Peavey PC1600 MIDI slider controller are involved. Certainly something is doing strange stuff to the source sounds - "Dragon's Domain" whizzes about all over the place in the stereo spectrum, overtone sounds running wild, while "Insidious Sedation" vocodes everything - voices, drums, strings, the lot.

"Zero X" runs distorted guitar-like sounds over insistent hi-hats, while "Nijinsky" features sparse and diffident xylophones disappearing into a reverberant distant space. "Sabine/Luna" sounds like 1960's computer music - all high harmonies and delicate modulations - while "Zoo Station Transit" appears to feature a distant saxophone - or perhaps it's a violin, or perhaps a wind synthesizer...

From all this you can guess that this is by no means a "conventional" synthy album. Certainly one for the more adventurous sonic experimentalist though. (M.J.)