Glen Bledsoe - Octopants
Billed as "experimental rapid-fire electronic compositions". I was really planning to not like this. Combining the words "experimental" and "electronic" in the same sentence as "compositions" just sounds like a sure-fire way to annoy me. And to make it worse, the description for the album talks about composing using pictures, and 34-note scales. Makes my blood run cold just thinking about the possibilities for musical horror.
But, to my surprise, this one is closer to a buy than many of the others I've listened to lately. It's got a lot more of interest and a lot more grab/soul than I was prepared for. This guy is perhaps one step shy of Jean-Michel Jarre (who I happen to also really enjoy). It's for a select audience (Wife wouldn't last through the first minute of any of the tracks), but to me it's pretty compelling. I'll be listening to this one again in the near future.
(Oh, and btw, Glen is the guy behind the Professor Armchair album I wrote about recently...)
1 comment:
I'm glad you liked Bledsoe's Octopants CD! When the Octopants CD was submitted, I was really set to hate it, and though on a first listen I thought it was too experimental, I decided to release it on Magnatune because I thought "this is really excellent music in its genre, and if a site like Magnatune won't release it, it will never find its audience, which would be a shame". It doesn't sell much, but I'm proud to carry it!
But, I think the Octopants CD is really catchy, in a deeply disturbed way, and obviously not the work of an amateur.
The same dilemma applied to Professor Armchair, a "children's music" side-project by Bledsoe. Again, brilliant, demented, and likely to have a small audience. Again we sat on it for a while, since "children's music" isn't what I had planned for Magnatune, but it is unique, and well done... so...
Be sure to check out the computer-animation video for Professor Armchair (on the bottom of the web page at http://magnatune.com/artists/armchair) -- it's really demented.
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