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Gratuitous Self-Aggrandizement Dept.



Hi all,

Please excuse the tiresome self-promotion. I don't write 
so very often (though I've been lurking here for over six years 
or more). My recent CD project just got it's first online review 
and I can't help but want to share. It's kinda funny.

It (the review) is sarcastic, well written and (to be fair) probably 
pretty darn accurate. It could be taken as either positive or 
negative depending on your tastes. I myself am not entirely 
sure -- ha! I'm just thrilled to have some press finally.

I pass it along to you thus ... see you on the funway!

>From DEAD ANGEL (Issue 48 - 9/01/01)
URL: http://www.monotremata.com/dead/issues/da48.html

Ted Killian -- FLUX AETERNA [pfMENTUM]

I've never heard of guitarist Ted Killian before, but apparently i should 
have. He's a guitarist in the vein of Fripp, Sharrock, and maybe even 
David 
Gilmour, creating droning and repetitive soundscapes with tweaked electric 
and acoustic guitars, often over a bedrock of alien-sounding loops. Some 
of 
this, like "Last Sparrow," is the sound of machines hallucinating -- in 
fact, 
in many ways this is a throwback to seventies acid-rock, only with more 
modern (and out-there) influences. Ambient, singing guitars play hypnotic 
avant-blues lines while other guitars hover quietly in the background on 
lock 
'n lull. Imagine Sonny Sharrock playing for Pink Floyd while Fripp natters 
on 
in the background with slo-mo starlight guitar loops that suffice for a 
"beat." That's the general gist of the songs here. The opener, 
"Hubble," begins with throbbing, swirling drone and graduates to 
brilliant, 
celestial guitars bursting like fireworks. "Leaving Medford," probably 
owes 
as much to Tangerine Dream as it does to any avant-guitar icons -- it's a 
pulsing slab o' tones rippling beneath a winding, scorched-earth guitar 
playing demented psychedelic machine blues. My favorite is probably "Last 
Sparrow," which opens with an endless chittering guitar loop, then slowly 
builds to a massive, droning collection of drawn-out machine tones before 
exiting on the same endless loop. "Recurvate Paint" sounds like something 
that could have come about during a collaboration with David Gilmour, 
circa 
his first solo album, and Fripp during his ambient Frippertronics phase. 
Pinging, ringing, endless ambient guitars become the backdrop to slo-mo 
psychedelic blues -- it sounds glacial and beautiful and seems to last 
forever. "Reverse Logic" is pretty bizarre in its own right, sounding like 
M's "Pop Muzak" as remixed by Techno-Animal and ripped apart, then rebuilt 
by 
grindcore players under the direction of Sonny Sharrock and Painkiller. By 
contrast, the guitars in "Convocation Solitaire" are all pretty ones -- 
acoustic, electric, clean, distorted, whatever, they're ringing those 
celestial tones. "Gravity Suspended" almost sounds like it could have come 
from a mislaid late-sixties Pink Floyd record -- in a lot of ways it's a 
kissing cousin to "The Narrow Way" -- but the title track is far weirder, 
more alien and monochromatic, like the sound of the Monolith in 2001 
vibrating, until a violin-like guitar soars above the increasingly noisy 
bedrock. This is seriously spaced-out stuff, and really well-executed to 
boot. This disc is one of the unexpected surprises of the issue....