COLLECTION

WAR SMASH HITS

  1/  Earthling - Kong                           (Kong)                        12.00
  2/  Black Djinn Trance - Bill Laswell          (Laswell)                     11.45
  3/  Calling N.Y. - Silk Saw                    (Silk Saw)                    14.10
  4/  L'Homme Arme - Laibach                     (Laibach)                     6.25

          Track 2 created at Greenpoint Studio, Brooklyn, New York, 1995
          Track 2 engineered by: Robert Musso
          Assistant on track 2: Layng Martine
          Track 2 produced by Bill Laswell

(2) Bill Laswell: bass, effects; Jah Wobble: upright electric bass; Tetsu Inoue: electronics; DJ Spooky: loop noise; Robert Musso: programming.

          1996 - Sub Rosa (Belgium), SR105 (CD)

REVIEWS :

Not sure of the origin of this thematic multi-artist project... Kong's "earthing" blends smooth dub action with big swirls of synth strings and spoken voices of "people at the refugee center crailo" in the Netherlands. The reason I snagged the disc though was the all-star line-up of Bill Laswell's "black djinn trance" featuring Jah Wobble, Tetsu Inoue and DJ Spooky... nice stuff, of course; I can't help but wonder though... when Laswell and Wobble get together, how do they decide who plays bass?

"calling n.y." (14:10) by Silk Saw drifts in a haze of symphonics, electric oscillations, disembodied voices, intermittent percussion all stirred into a generally slow groove (which is intruded upon by erupting chaos toward its end...). Operatic female voices open Laibach's "l'homme armé" (6:25) to be barraged with explosive orchestral manuevers... thunderous drums, assaultive brass, screaming strings, all of which crescendo then fade into nothingness... seven minutes later, an eight minute selection of various wartime field recordings (circa WWII, apparently) are presented in a streaming audio-collage of foreign voices, gunshots, crowd noise, machinery, general atmospherics and other not-so-readily-identifiable sources.

8.2/10

David Opdyke (courtesy of the Ambient Entrance website)