Album Notes

CDBaby official review:

Like Primus, Sun Ra and Zappa meeting inside a pinball machine, cross-breeding and sprouting new appendages while video game-like effects bounce in and out, PLASTIC MACHINE MUSIC is an ingenius hybrid of jazz fusion backdrops, experimental electronic innovation and a poprock-informed writing. While like almost all electronica, the progression and development is more linear than vertical, additive and layered, born of its computer-based, sequencing conception, there is still creative development of motives and ideas, an overall giddy enjoyment of urban, industrial and machine noises. 5 STARS!!

All about Jazz says:

"PLASTIC MACHINE MUSIC is proof enough that [Greg Pagel] is off his damned rocker, and proud to be so. And I think it is a very good thing for all of us that he is ... there's humor in the music, like in the discordant accordion funk of 'It's Hard Work' and the pastiche of new wave synthesizers in 'The 80's Sucked'; and even in song titles like 'Flesh-Eating 7th Chords' and 'Santorum.' (If you don't get that one, you had better do some research.)

His is a big Dadaist sensibility, where anything can happen in service of a song. Sometimes he'll construct a fake scat solo over an electronic loop with sampled piano ('Oddbop'). At other times, he might need to put a fake-Chinese wind-chime top over a lazy hip-hop-esque beat ('Mission Accomplished') or let synth squiggles run amok, like someone was holding mid-period Herbie Hancock over a pot of boiling oil."