PARADOXE

'Paradoxe' begins off sounding like Steve Hillage's 'Rainbow Dome Music', but quickly devolves into something much stranger. This 1978 oddity by members of the awesome 'non-music' entity 'MEV' is far more electronic and tuneful than the afore mentioned band. Full of fat beefy analogue synths of a proto-industrial persuasion from the late 70's.

Mr MEV - Frederic Rzewski uses an amplified glass plate to which he attaches stretched and coiled springs to produce some of the odd sounds present on this 42 minute album.

Alvin Curran (MEV) is also on board here, doing strange things like using contact mikes to amplify a large African thumb piano and bits of what can only be described as 'junk'. Third member Richard Teitelbaum plays Moog using - and yes I mean this - his toes, heartbeat and brainwaves. What the??!!

There's quite a lot of treated guitar on the second half of the album which is quite nice and there's some superb keyboard reverb weirdness, but needless to say, this won't appeal to many. Fans of 'Atem' to 'Rubycon' by Tangerine Dream and the more experimental listeners of prog may get a lot out of this. There's not much in the way of tunes that you'll be whistling afterwards though, but it's still a pretty good effort.

Dreamy...