If there was any more of a vital, definitive, neé necessary aural project that validated the continued existence of the CD, I'm unable to come up with one. The six musicians that comprise the West Coast electronic offensive known as The Hub — Mark Trayle, John Bischoff, Chris Brown, Tim Perkis, Phil Stone, and Scot Gresham-Lancaster — can trace their earliest recordings back to the pre-laptop era of the late 80s, when such randy sonic experimentalism arose either from nascent Fairlights or sound labs nestling within many a university campus nationwide. Little seems to be known of The Hub's very existence outside its locale, although many of its members have explored careers of varying success beyond its barriers (Brown has recorded for Tzadik, Trayle's a journeyman improviser, Bischoff's a well-known sound designer in his own right, and Perkis has a number of singular recordings to his credit); kudos to Tzadik honcho John Zorn for bringing the collective's recordings deeper into the public consciousness, as it were.
Each of the three discs in this sprawling set are individually titled, ostensibly to reflect their respective modus operandis. Skip the labeling, though, and consider the very natures of these computer-generated sounds themselves, mapping direct links across a broad legion of artists, situations, and concerns: the sheer fertile nature of these sonic canvases reference Stockhausen, Pierre Henry and Xenakis; rebounding academia courtesy of Tod Machover's prescient computer controllers; the blip and drone nirvanas of Pauline Oliveros, Subotnick, even latter-day Alvin Curran and MEV. But this is a group of musicians shocking the new and tilting the avant-garde thanks to then-provocative new interfaces begging to be explored and exploited. The music that resulted peeped everything from Metropolis-styled science fiction dystopias and cybernetic systems gone hideously awry, to metal machine symphonies where buzzing electrical arcs and aberrant digital hiccups mocked the physic pliancies of hoary "acoustics". Who did what throughout these dense thickets of electronic hubris provided The Hub with its own distinct mythology, the members' pronounced tendencies subjugated into the greater whole — the irony is that in this day and age, one lone individual would endeavor to wreak similar havoc with a single laptop and a battery of soft synths. This is not to mitigate The Hub's extraordinary facilities or dampen its wondrous appeal, but it does place things in broader perspective; erecting these uncanny pieces meant untold hours spent in front of "ancient" monitors hotwiring innumerable bits/bytes of ideas to equipment.
It's difficult to simply pick out any one work across the three discs on hand, yet amid the torrent of ionized squeaks, taut drones, belching circuitry, and diodic ejaculations there arose a small degree of commonality. The Polling disc contains the collective's earliest work, and emits a Subotnick-ian glee that strips it of any chronological context so the listener can simply revel in the sounds. On disc two, entitled Pushing, a Zappa-esque humor (not to mention compositional frivolity) imbues both names and nuances: "Waxlips 1" sounds like someone tumbling down the basement stairs armed with music boxes and warped xylophones; "Wheelies" is indeed the sounds of electronics somersaulting and leaping high into air, and is about as "rhythmic" as The Hub ever gets; "Hertz Donut" surges with simultaneous drama and absurdity. The Boundary Layer disc features later, lengthier works that certainly retain their characteristic wow and flutter (and wow's the key word here: "Hot Potato" imagines some unholy confluence between the Barron's electronic tonalities and an audiological experiment gone haywire), made with more contemporary instruments and processing yet amped up to the hilt. Much post-academic electronic music of the era becomes tepid by comparison, dissociative and date-stamped, but not The Hub — should you truly value your digital heritage, this formative document is nigh on essential.
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