A work of collage, but almost a document, a research project, a study on a traumatic section of our universal musical culture (2 copious CD for a very vast and complex matter). One could say [it is] the analysis of the repressive and coercive role of the liberal music of department store, music[s] of conditioning, forced therapies at the service of a fun vision of your situation in society.
And everything goes. By successive waves. Overlapping, interpenetrating. Impetuous waves of sublime sillinesses. Primped [looking pretty]. Layers of tap dancing. Layers of chabada. A swirl for the romantic rags [magazines]. Tons of the pathetic. A flood of orchestral vacuities. Layers of "Volare" [the song]. Layers of spaghetti westerns. Layers of jingle bells. Layers of melodies of happiness. A swirl of sound tapes for certificates of the good life and morals. Syrupy praise of quietness, of the flat social electroencephalogram. Layers of "whisper" [speak more quietly]. Layers of heroic tear jerkers.
From superposition to superposition, here is a fabulous oozing pile-up.
All of these musics of the century are the testimony of a will to contain anguish, to drive back anxiety, to contain impulses in a watched [in the sense of surveillance], policed environment. And in this accumulation carried out by David Schafer, something occurs, unforeseen. Accumulation, the reactivated memory of pressures exerted on the social by these sterilizing ditties, makes these insipidities suddenly, excessively aggressive. It is complete symbolic violence contained - applied in homeopathic amounts, to the body of the social - which suddenly breaks out all at once.
What a grand disturbance!
From the infernal orchestra pit rises the nightmare! It overflows, oozes from everywhere, formidable nausea ("Clockwork Orange" style, except that here the horror is distilled by the most asexual music[s], the least suggestive to the act - it is a whole enterprise of repression which suddenly throws up).
Impressive! Trying! Essential experiment.
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Wherein “ten easy listening records played at the same
time (either in “two-second gaps” or “variable gaps”)
that take you right up above the muzak ether.” The
design and execution of this particular curiosity are
green and impeccable. Its a bit like changing
channels on the radio, this – however, the only
stations available are the easy listening ones. This
is not necessarily a bad thing – and this would make a
fantastic installation piece. At times, the waves of
nostalgia buffet gently against ones craft,
depending on whatever pharmaceuticals one has at hand
– at other times, its as if the drug spiral drags one
down through the nightmare psycho-logical sequences
from a 1960s film where the ending is anything but
certain.

In the face of considerable – yet identifiable
cacophony – the mind picks out recognizable and
comforting snippets (usually rhythmic) with which to
console itself. Alessandro Alessandroni is the person
behind the unique whistling on the Sergio Leone
Western soundtracks. That’s the most vivid thing I
could find.

This is a simultaneously comforting and cacophonic
series of recordings a rare duality indeed.
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