MEDALLION ANIMAL CARPET

Oddball RIO/Prog music with Bob handling almost all the instruments and vocals. Bob was a founding member of Thinking Plague, but from the mid 90s onward has winged it alone in a good solo career. Some of this album (Part One) sounds like a cross between Yes and Captain Beefheart. Most of the lyrics in this part were created by a random word generator program. (for real). The general mood is that of chaos - massed sounds and voices colliding with each other, but in a rhythmic, ultimately musical fashion. Rhythmic tracks are high in the mix, as are the voices. Various guitar, bass and keyboard sounds fill in the rest.

Towards the end, there's a stretch of old time/hootenanny standards purposely recorded in bootleg-quality; sounds really otherworldly, like someone held a microphone outside of a barn dance in 1920.

Drake has a truly unique way of making music - very intuitive, as if he dreams up the sounds in his head and then uses his recording expertise to match those sounds on a recording. For him, composition of music seems to have little to do with writing notes on paper. Rather, as a self-contained unit, he relies solely on his own instincts, creating unique pieces and albums that feel like nothing less than the audio equivalent of his dreams.