Bang on a Can - Gigantic Dancing Human Machine (CD)

All Music Guide

Bang on a Can invites you to "Meet the Hocketers" on this CD featuring three works by Dutch avant classical composer Louis Andriessen, whose music sometimes seems designed to give you a headache. Thankfully, Gigantic Dancing Human Machine is nicely programmed to give the listener a bit of variety within Andriessen's often rigorously minimalistic world, so that the madnessinducing "Hoketus," for example, is followed by the gentler "Hout" ("Wood"), in which Evan Ziporyn's tenor sax lines are sequentially echoed with great precision by guitarist Mark Stewart, marimbist Steven Schick, and pianist Lisa Moore to create a mesmerizing hallofmirrors effect. And the musicians' touch is also rather light on the opening "Workers Union," which achieves its own sense of controlled lunacy mainly from oddball detuned harmonics chamber jazz performed by extremely precise drunks. But the nearly 24minute "Hoketus" is the centerpiece and, if you are adequately prepared to put this on your CD player, you ...will hear the musicians walk or perhaps pound on the line between minimalist trance and minimalist craziness, a bit like Steve Reich compositions played with hammers and anvils rather than mallets and marimbas. Once "Hoketus" winds up into its full mechanistic assault, the curious result is music whose manic callandresponse repetitions and variations seem designed to induce a trance while instantaneously wrenching the listener out of said trance. The instrumentation on this piece (also performed with deranged inspiration on the Rogue's Gallery CD by British contemporary avant renegades Icebreaker, whose Katherine Pendry is part of the ensemble here) is similarly contradictory, including not only electric bass guitars (two of them), congas (two sets of them, too), and Fender Rhodes (OK, everything is in twos, just like your ears) but also pan pipes, employed in a way that might suggest a parallel universe in which Zamfir showed up for the Bang on a Can session straight from his earlier gig with Glenn Branca. One could reasonably ask why anyone would want to listen to a piece of music as ultimately relentless as the nearly 24minute "Hoketus," with its measured windup of pingponging rhythms (headphones are absolutely essential for the full hocketing effect) and abrupt shifts into even more glorious levels of agitation at the eight and 20minute marks (at 20 minutes "Hoketus" actually takes on the melodic and harmonic characteristics of more conventional music). For one thing, there is always a sense of amazement inherent in listening to artists as skilled as those in Bang on a Can get through a piece like this without a slipup. And then there is also a sense of accomplishment for you, dear listener, at having gotten through it yourself with a measure of sanity intact. - Dave Lynch, All Music Guide Read more Less