Album Notes

All-Music Guide: Four Stars
"A wonderful, accessible, and yet challenging album from one of new music's brightest lights."

Stereophile: Four Stars
"One of the few composers in the post-sampler era to fully develop that tool's fascinating and witty potential."


Jay Cloidt concocts his slyly humorous pieces with what Carl Stone calls "skill, wit, perversity, and adroitness."The composer's spliced-together deconstructions of both classical and pop references, combined with his masterful sampling of everyday sounds, are, as Stone notes, "fabulous and fun to behold."

Cloidt's technically sophisticated music has delighted audiences throughout the US and overseas. London's Musical Times writes that Exploded View is "the stuff of surrealist fantasy: a string quartet playing with the straight-backed elegance of the Viennese tradition but producing the voices of industrial machinery, kitchen appliances, roaring animals and whining babies." And the Los Angeles Times comments that Karoshi (1995) is "a hoot... The piece, made of sampled crashes and kabooms and cartoony melodies, knows exactly how to fill five minutes."

The Kronos Quartet begin the CD with the effervescent Kole Kat Krush, which they commissioned and premiered. This frequently programmed piece careens between Stravinsky, Beethoven, Eric Clapton, and Sly Stone, among others.

The CD's major work, Life is Good...And People Are Basically Decent, was commissioned by and has been regularly performed by the Paul Dresher Ensemble to appreciative audiences. The CD also offers Jimi's Fridge (based on a sampled refrigerator motor) and the soothing, hypnotic Light Fall.