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AXOLOTL - Memory Theater - cd
imprec120 - CD - $11.99 
Memory Theater is an absolutely essential collection of
the best of Axolotl's out of print cdrs and vinyl only releases.
Karl Bauer spent quite a bit of time collaborating with
acclaimed members of the noise underground before heading off
on his own as Axolotl. In the last couple of years Axolotl
have released numerous cd, cdr and vinyl releases many of which
quickly went out of print and started demanding some serious coin
on ebay. Memory Theater collects the best of these out of
print releases into one convenient package designed by Karl Bauer.
Julian Cope on Object Phantom:
"So is the super scrawled longform meditational album OBJECT
PHANTOM, by Axolotl. Released on Ron Schneidermann's
superb Spirit Of Orr label, these four long mesmerising pieces are
played grooves of real
cosmic use. Search them out because there are never many copies
of each Spirit Of Orr release."
Volcanic Tongue on Chemical Theatre:
Here Karl Bauer uses violin, vocals, electronics and percussion
to assemble huge fields of strafing white light that somehow reconcile
the all-night flights of Terry Riley and the clouds of lung generated
by Yoshi Wada with flickers of microdot vision and stoned oblivion
poems. His set at Subcurrent was absolutely outstanding, accelerating
Partch-like percussive miniatures into huge vertical architectures
and this is another great blat of rigorously thought-out modern
American sound. Highly recommended.
The Spooky Action Axolotl bio:
Axolotl is Karl Bauer, classically-trained violinist and a dedicated
student of gnosticism, alchemy, and certain other materialist tendencies
in psychology and philosophy. Bauer belongs to a small but potent
association of young musicians, who draw upon the gestural economy
and textural range of minimalism, and the visceral force of noise,
while eschewing fashionable prohibitions against musicality, raw
beauty, and thematic complexity. A certain postmodern timidity (offered
up as boldness itself) compromises the rhetoric and methods of contemporary
experimentalism. Noise, in both its reductionist and maximalist
variants, too often provides the easy cover of
superficial extremity to gloss over bankrupt ideas about aesthetics,
ideas that essentially encourage the abandonment of extra-sonic
ambitions and overtly expressive forms. With considerable dialectical
subtlety, Axolotl
refuses this refusal. Bauer's music displays, at every point, a
committed engagement with the literally ecstatic capacities of sound.
He manages an astonishing conservation of structure at the edge
of a consuming incoherence. Indeed, this is the guiding metaphor
of Axolotl's compositions: the development of forms out of formlessness;
the description, by still-inchoate rhythms and figures, of processes
that exceed any more definite articulation. In short, Bauer is that
least postmodern of artists, a truth-seeking universalist who believes,
impenitent, in the ability of
beauty to set thought free, and in the power of thought to invent
new images of its own impossible work.
If you're interested, this is the origin of the title Memory
Theater
MP3
Chemical
Theater
Oranur
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