Memory and Imagination is an essential retrospective of Cleveland’s best work.
author: Peter Thelen, Expose' Magazine
This two-disc set is essentially a compilation (and a fairly complete one, at that) of Barry Cleveland’s works through the mid 90s. The first disc contains almost all of his first two albums, Mythos (1986) and Voluntary Dreaming (1989), while disc two features the original Memory & Imagination material recorded in the early 90s, two tracks from Stones of Precious Water (private cassette release from 1981), and "Echoes on Echoes," a track recorded in 2003 for John Diliberto’s Echoes radio program. In fact much of Cleveland’s work doesn’t sound like the work of your conventional guitarist at all, but rather a far-reaching compositional visionary who uses whatever instruments and processes necessary to achieve his ends.
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Different, accessible, and just under two hours of enjoyment.
author: Andy G., CD Services (U.K.)
In many ways, Barry Cleveland was the forerunner of the "guitarist making waves in the synth music world" genre. The odd part about this, as opposed to the more recent guitarists such as Dwane, is that Cleveland made no attempt to let his work "sound" like a synth, and arranged any electronics to serve pretty much as textural filler. And yet he was a strong force in, and loved by, the synth music fraternity.
This CD is a tale of two halves. The first CD looks back on his work from the eighties, taking a gorgeous set of tracks from albums such as Voluntary Dreaming and Mythos, and revealing that the real musical comparison, if you have to, is more someone like Steve Tibbetts than anything, only here, more celestial sounding in the main. The first couple of tracks are guitar chords, layers and textures set to rolling multi-instrument ethnic percussion that has resonance, feel and depth in the same way that someone like Steve Roach uses it. It's a full sound but one that has the effect of watching clouds passing by in a blue sky on a summer's day - magical.
"Visual Purple" is even slower but has flow as the drums and chords become a bit grander and stronger, while "The Inward Spiral" is just Cleveland on piano, synth, guitar textures and samplers, all quite beautifully constructed and played to sound melodic, celestial and slightly eerie. "Cleopatra's Needle" is similar, while the following track, "Hawk Dreaming" sees the pace increased as an electric guitar soars away on top of the resonant bass synth-like and mulit-percussive rhythmic background, with a solo that is just superb and very much in classic Tibbetts mould, a fantastic track.
Then come the three tracks from the Mythos album, first a five-minute slice of lazy elegance with drifting synths, lilting xylophones and gorgeous guitar clouds. Then comes a track—the seven minutes of "Abrasax"—that could almost be out of the Fripp way of doing things. With Discipline-era-styled searing guitar and Lyricon lines that weave a thread across layers of the trademark cascading Fripp-esque guitar rhythms, but around all this a bass synth line resonates, and that cyclical percussive backdrop adds extra depth. Another fantastic piece of music.
You get the whole 19 minutes of the Mythos title track that starts very exotic with tinkling percussion, hushed flowing flute, almost violin-like sweeps and a high-register flute and distant textures in the background, as the piece evolves, flowing, drifting and flying with texture, atmosphere, melody and grace. With a constantly changing instrumental arrangement, it is this combination of guitars, Lyricon, flutes and percussion that charts a full-sounding and largely essentially rhythm-free course through the track. Ending with a rather fine remix of the first track, this has to be seen as a wondrous CD.
CD2 is nearly all previously unreleased music, this time from the early Nineties. Three of them were recorded with Dobro/slide guitarist Carl Weingarten, who adds his extra soundscapes and melodies to the tracks, the album's title track being a mammoth 24-minute piece that features Weingarten on Dobro and Cleveland on guitar, bowed guitar, Ebow guitar and bowhammer guitar. One that starts in celestial mood then, over the course of its length, gradually intensifies, with ever more layers added, eventually a rhythm breaking out from the cyclical guitars towards the fifteen-minute point as the track moves to Gunther Schickert territory for this finale of cyclical guitars and flowing warm backdrops.
Elsewhere we hear the guitars, electronics and percussion at one end and the Fripp-meets-Tibbetts stuff at the other, the five-minute guitar-only piece "Echoes On Echoes" being the one in question to represent the latter style. But throughout the feel is one of warmth, space, multi-leveled soundscaping, melodic without being tune-laden and generally washing over you with a replenishing effect.
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Memory and Imagination is an essential retrospective of Cleveland’s best work.
author: Peter Thelen, Expose' Magazine
This two-disc set is essentially a compilation (and a fairly complete one, at that) of Barry Cleveland’s works through the mid 90s. The first disc contains almost all of his first two albums, Mythos (1986) and Voluntary Dreaming (1989), while disc two features the original Memory & Imagination material recorded in the early 90s, two tracks from Stones of Precious Water (private cassette release from 1981), and "Echoes on Echoes," a track recorded in 2003 for John Diliberto’s Echoes radio program. In fact much of Cleveland’s work doesn’t sound like the work of your conventional guitarist at all, but rather a far-reaching compositional visionary who uses whatever instruments and processes necessary to achieve his ends.
Read more...