K7C - 6 Fingers Crossed Country T.Ore/Tour
- tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE & t he booed usicians - $6.00
- (90 minutes)
From: "Sound Choice" #6 - us@
tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE & T HE BOOED USICIANS: 6 Fingers Crossed Country T.Ore/Tour Neoist, SubGenius, arrestee-tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (that's right) is a publisher, filmmaker, noisemaker and animate art object. Some artists want to make people happy. tENT, who disclaims art, just wants to make things happen. This cassette contains the aural aspect of his 1986 "Mad Scientist Didaction" tour which occasioned unease in such stops as Baltimore, Boston, and Ann Arbor. Of course it's not the same without the films and the human canvas which tENT habitually makes of his own body, but there's still enough here of what Revo in No. 5 called "destroyed sound" to empty a room. tENT makes Flipper or Throbbing Gristle sound like the Beach Boys. And doesn't that tell us something we didn't know before?-Bob Black
From: "Factsheet Five" #21 - us@
TENTATIVELY A CONVENIENCE & T HE BOOED USICIANS, "6 Fingers Crossed Country T.Ore/Tour" Subheaded as being records of the "Mad Scientist Didactions" which tent and his crew performed across the land this summer. The Situationists used to do what they called "detournement", using visual images from the mass culture with new captions to make a point. This is sort of audio detournement, making heavy use of tape loops [probably NO tape loops actually] of things from classical music to Braodway musicals [none of those either that I can recall] as a background to screaming [nope, no screaming either], pounding [nope] and other activities in the foreground, tent performs, perhaps not music, but he does perform, and no doubt there was a heavy visual component to all this in person (in fact one piece here is a soundtrack to a film). But even without the liveness and video, this tape can serve as an exploration of music pushed far beyond its usual limits. On the borderline between industrial, psychotic, SubGenial, and other fringe genres. (T/MG)
[Mike Gunderloy will always rank as the most amazing reviewer of all time to me. Before he handed Factsheet Five over to his various successors, he was reviewing truly incredible amounts of extremely diverse material & actually managing to say relevant & intelligent things about them. There's no way I can imagine myself performing his task. With that in mind, my bracketed insertions above serve not to criticize Mike but to point out that heavily overused clichés of the Home-Taper "Industrial" material were taken for granted as always in any dense material without their necessarily being there. Loops, screaming, & pounding (not to mention recordings of televangelists, Charlie Manson, & Jim Jones) were not usually in my vocabulary.]
From: "Sound Choice" #9 - us@
tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE & T HE BOOED USICIANS: Six Fingers Crossed Country T.Ore/Tour C
This is a record of a tour. The band seems to love Bob Dobbs and pays reverence to his holy slackness through a mass of free improvisations created from whatever is available at the time [actually carefully selected material], including a wide variety of radio and tape manipulation, saxes, violins, lyres, synthesis and wild percussion. Musical moments range from manic tribal barrage, to '50s sci-fi nightmare. Instrumentality is at a premium, with some amusing interterrestrial travel on the synthesizer, and some very nasty violin assaults, particularly in the opening moments of the tape. These people could be downright annoying, but it's so hard not to love them. (démo tapes)--Nathan Griffith
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The reviews are not necessarily copied verbatim from the original. Usually, small apparent typos are corrected & obsolete addresses are removed. In some cases, I may choose to leave misspellings, misinformation, etc intact to demonstrate how sloppy the reviewer is. Of course, there may be times when the original packaging was confusing (deliberately or otherwise) which may effect the reviewer's comprehension. The more recent the tapes are, the less likely this is to be the case. Most of the recent tapes provide fairly extensive liner notes. In some cases, reviewers whose native language isn't English may be writing in English anyway for the sake of 'internationalizing' their reviews. Obviously, this may lead to what strikes native English speakers as 'bad' English. Hopefully, equally obviously, this should not be interpreted as a lack of intelligence in the writing. Editorial notes may be inserted into the reviews in [brackets]. In many instances, I (tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE) replied to reviews that I disagreed with strongly. These replies are included here. In some cases, I may add additional retrospective comments.