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JUST RELEASED:
SETTINGS - Music For Dance, Film, Fashion and Industry
Best known for his legendary guitar group Band Of Susans, Robert Poss continues to inspire with SETTINGS, a collection of music commissioned by choreographers Sally Gross, Alexandra Beller and Gerald Casel for three extraordinary modern dance companies, accompanied by other recent pieces for guitar, percussion and electronics. Its imaginative soundscapes represent a departure from Poss’ dense, wall-of-distortion guitar-and-electronic solo pieces and from the ecstatic Rock minimalism of Band Of Susans, yet threads of both are evident in this latest release. "Robert Poss rings bells just like he's playing guitar. The chimes ring out during the opening piece on Settings, but you only have to wait for the second track for those bells to run into thrumming strings. His abiding love for electric guitar is no casual dalliance or detached Platonic infatuation; it's an erotic commitment, an obsessive plunge into the instrument's metallic churn and enveloping drone. That's been the way at least since Poss formed Band Of Susans with Susan Stenger in 1986, when he was also performing with Rhys Chatham. That phase reverberates through the motoric churn of "With Music No. 2", a composition commissioned by choreographer Sally Gross. Pieces written for the dance companies of Alexandra Beller and Gerald Casel also feature here along with music for specific occasions, as the subtitle indicates. His use of percussion, piano and electronics, and the broadly Ambient feel of tracks such as "Inverness" or "Then I Realized," might suggest that Poss has changed as he has developed, but the six-‐stringed and amplified core of his musical imagination remains the same whatever the actual sound source. He's certainly extending into other areas here -‐ the hobbling honky-‐tonk of "Border Piano Walk," the synthetic orchestral pomp of "Tourniquet Revisited" -‐ but the concluding live solo, "Robert Palmer Tribute Coda," leaves no doubt at all that at heart Poss is still a guy in love with a guitar. Go Robert Go."
-Julian Cowley, Wire, December 2010 To Order:
$8.00 + $2 postage (domestic) and $4 (overseas). New York State residents please add appropriate Sales Tax (8.45%). Paypal: RMPoss@Pipeline.com or check in U.S. dollars payable to: Trace Elements Records, 172 East 4th Street #11-D, New York, NY 10009 |