Office-R(6)Recording the Grain plays like the soundtrack to an imaginary cartoon. An invisible menagerie of animals creep, shuffle, and chase each other wielding giant mallets and lightsabres across an equally-invisible landscape of mad-scientist's laboratories, rabbit holes, wide open plains and hissing and crackling power plants. Office-R(6) create a canvass of silence or very quiet drones and then punctuate this space with an array of atonal noises derived from both the unconventional use of traditional acoustic instrumentation and electronic sounds, treatments and manipulation provided by laptops. The structure of their music is highly non-linear and studiously avoids any sense of logical development or of obviously pressing the listeners' emotional buttons. There is a palpable sense of purpose to Recording the Grain, all six musicians seem intensely focussed on close listening and are highly restrained in their contributions. As hinted above, in many ways this recording sounds like an improvised take on the music of Warner Brothers composer Carl Stalling, filtered through the postmodernist sensibilities of Derek Bailey and John Zorn. The results are unsettling, but paint some rather wonderful primary-coloured pictures on the inside of one's head. -- nick ilott.
:: Office-R(6)/Recording the Grain - +3dB Records.
