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MUSIC CATALOGUE: Brand X
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Press for Morris Pert:
MORRIS PERT Desert Dances & The Music of Stars Scottish composer and maverick Morris Pert’s long, storied career and continued trajectory (now over 30 years in the making) might surprise many who are only aware of his work shoring up 70s jazz-rock outfits such as Brand X or on loan to Peter Gabriel, Mike Oldfield and Kate Bush. Having studied under master percussionist Stomu Yamash’ta no doubt laid the groundwork for his own noteworthy accomplishments, but Pert’s a restless spirit who aligns himself with any number of folks operating well outside common spheres of influence. A little known fact regarding his resumé is that Pert’s made successful inroads into avantgarde composition and experimental electronics; given his credo, what’s surprising is how extraordinary these recordings are, rich with textures obvious and arcane, innovative in so many respects that Pert’s relative obscurity to many is a situation now in sore need of amendment. Desert Dances goes a long way towards balancing the scales. Pert’s assimilation of far-flung drumming techniques, not to mention his commandeering a staggering assortment of rhythm-makers that augment his piquant electronics, melds into a sonic tour-de-force of progressive mores that gives a whole new meaning to the term “world music.” In a parallel universe where mawkish trends are nonexistent and artists instead of corporations mandate categorical imperatives, Pert’s all-embracing dogma would inform a “worldly” music bridging sub-Saharan percussive apparati with the most vivid harmonic colors technology has to offer. Though the tracks have some obvious signifiers—Jon Hassell, Steve Shehan, Wally Badarou, Steve Roach—their vertical constructions also allow for the consumption of noise (delayed synths propping the heady climes of “Baktra”) and even broach Pert’s prior jazz affiliations, which spirit amongst the organ/synth borogroves of “Casablanca” and the nighttime piano cascades of “Tangier Nights.” Still, the record is naggingly difficult to pin down—pianos descend as much from avantgarde soundtracks as Bowie’s Low, synths iris out of a fourth-world steambath, and the interlocking percussive maelstrom Pert whips up recall a noisier O Yuki Conjugate less than Mickey Hart. Regardless, Desert Dances marries primitive soul tribalisms to front brain acrobatics in a way not seen since the heyday of Hassell’s Power Spot. The Music of Stars is a whole different animal. Here, Pert’s broken free of his earthly moorings to travel the spaceways, as itinerant an explorer as any dozen bedroom boffins mainlining their moogs. Quoting space critters past (pre-sequencer Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, et al) and current (Heldon and even Biosphere creep to mind), Pert’s either kept his ear to the ground, channeling contemporary wizards of the drone and dark ambient arts, or somehow, within the vacuum of his studio, stumbled on to what might one day be considered a diehard electronic classic. Isolationist not only in concept but design, layered yet disarmingly subtle when it needs to be, there’s plenty here to stimulate the cerebral cortex and inner ear canals: the gaping abyssal synths of “Spica” rise up out of breathless silences amid strange twinkles and deepspace gasps; “Arich” relies on reverbed gongs and pulsing liquid rushes to catapult you far into its ominous core; the extraterrestrial metallurgy of “Heze” resonates with a latent power that is nearly overwhelming in scope. Effectively maximizing the effect of pregnant pauses that cushion his jetblack drones, Pert’s managed to realize a work that finds a unique middle-ground between the Alien soundtrack and the solipsistic ambient of artists like Sleep Research Facility and Tholen. Beyond engrossing, this is one of the finest and most allegorical pieces of dreadzone electronica you’ll come across this year.
The Music of Stars might sound like just a meaninglessly "poetic" title, but as a matter of fact, it's merely descriptive of this strange and oddly compelling album, originally released in 2001. British composer and percussionist Morris Pert composed and recorded The Music of Stars as the first part of a loosely defined trilogy of releases sharing themes of distance and topography. The Music of Stars is quite literally a space rock album, except that instead of the sci-fi themes of Hawkwind or Pink Floyd, Pert took the amplified sound of the universe's natural background radiation as his conceptual starting point. Basically, imagine if God had tinnitus. That ever-shifting tension between a maddening tuneless drone and otherworldly, celestial harmonies is at the root of The Music of Stars. These nine lengthy pieces, each named after a different distant solar object, unfold slowly and serenely, lacking anything as conventional as melody or rhythm. What keeps The Music of Stars from being mindless new age bliss-out music is the harshly-textured, dirty edge Pert gives much of the electronics, as well as the atonality and seeming randomness of his percussion parts. (Pert plays all the instruments, electronic and acoustic, himself.) Offsetting the quiet beauty of passages like the chiming, twinkling washes of notes that flutter across "Syrma" with sudden grinding buzzes and clatters reminds the listener that no matter how beautiful the starlit night is, that light is provided by far-off violent and destructive nuclear reactions. So yeah, it's more than a little pretentious if you think about it too hard, but The Music of Stars remains an enjoyable listen. Stewart Mason All Music Guide The Music of Stars was a descriptively titled album of songs inspired by the background noise of the universe. The Voyage (actually a previously unreleased work recorded in the 1970s but not issued until after the turn of the millennium) contains impressionistic echoes of sea travel. And so 2006's Desert Dances completes the trilogy with an album inspired in part by the indigenous sounds of various North African musical styles. It helps to know that Morris Pert is part of the same old-school U.K. progressive rock scene that includes Peter Gabriel (whose albums Pert has played on in his day job as a session drummer), because Desert Dances bears a strong influence from Gabriel's similar explorations. By some distance Pert's most immediately accessible album, Desert Dances is basically a blend of jazz, progressive rock and ambient music that's spiced with percussion and other accents from Moroccan or other North African forms, but wisely, Pert stops well short of attempting to replicate this music himself. In fact, the best songs here like the languid, jazzy piano improvisation "Tangier Nights," and the circling, mutating keyboard lines of "Mama Quilla," sound more like Another Green World-era Brian Eno or trumpeter Jon Hassell's experiments in ethno-fusion jazz than the average vaguely colonialist "worldbeat" album, and they're all the better for that. |