2CD – Fang Bomb

Paul Baran is a composer, electroacoustics sound designer and improviser, who lives and works in Glasgow. He is often engaged in collaborations with other musicians, as for example in his first album (2009) for the label Fang Bomb, where he called to action different musicians, as Werner Dafeldecker, Ekkehard Ehlers, Keith Rowe and Andrea Belfi. Now this Pan Global Riot also includes many musicians, twenty-one, a well-matched patrol covering various skills and free form approaches. At the time of the artificial intelligences, the commitment to cut across a specific genre is definitely not anymore a distinctive theme for a contemporary musician, nor attractive for that part of the audience, that likes to focus on the many directions the newest researches always explore. The technical possibilities now software, power of calculation and setting allow made the experimental scenes often a very complex jumble of extremely conceptual and self-referential productions. However, Paul Baran has always in mind the present, simply mixing politics, electroacoustics, chamber music and p-funk, in a sort of kaleidoscopic miscellany of reality and acousmatic disorder, as in the wonderful “Agitpop”, a jumble of alien swing, third worldism and overflowing rhythms, or as in “The Politics of Distraction”, that is another significant example of deconstructed funky and now lacking of any coordinate of reference. The titles of the track tell us about the material world and have several references: Trump, the artist and activist Ai Weiwei, the African cyborgs, the pandemic and various social and political problems in Great Britain. The participation of several musicians from different countries and continents, problematic places as the Old Europe is, show at the same time a criticism, that mixes creativity and daily live, disillusion and survivance. Clearly the mix of experiences takes place also under the strictly musical point of view, with electronics and acoustic instruments (violin, trumpet, piano, drums, keyboards, field recording and a lot more), full of extremely rarefied and suspended scores, as in “Covid and Crow”, or elegiac, but also extremely rhythmic passages, in “Music for the Precariat”, with sometimes an extensive use of textual elements (in “Zero sum Game” and in “English Pastoral”), or with classical caesura (in “Logos”). In both the two CDs the listening is engaging, fluent and very broad, it leads us to reconcile ourselves with an avant-garde that, despite everything, does what it can do better, spreading its own interpretative networks and simply playing.

 

Paul Baran – Pan Global Riot