spectropol records

The first batch of reviews for Marco Oppedisano’s excellent Spectropol EP are in. Check ’em out!

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The Stash Dauber

Touching Extremes

A VERITAS VAMPIRUS CD REVIEW:

MARCO OPPEDISANO – Resolute (EP-CD)

Marco Oppedisano’s a highly imagistically abstract experimental guitarist-composer-noiseur (include piano, voice, and percussion in that, too) in Brooklyn, New York, and Resolute is his latest release after a much too long quietus, his last effort having emerged in 2010. This new affair arrived quite fortuitously to my attention, as I’d at the moment been listening to Escapade’s duetoafaultypremonition, a satisfyingly experimental noisy affair as well, though definitely zoned-hippie as compared to Marco’s neoclassicalism. His 5-track 21+-minute EP demonstrates the marked contrast in myriad differences between a single highly disciplined musician and a very cool mess of on-the-fly players like Escapade, a sextet.

Marco’s work has long been mindful me of an unusual conflation of any number of past influences: Morton Subotnick (who teaches or taught at the same school as Oppedisano), Morphogenesis, Faust, Cluster, PBK, and a collage of others…but also of an obscure 80s cat, John Wiggins, an HBO sound engineer who released a series of extremely three-dimensional, sonically pristine, found-sound/noise/avant-garde issuances. Oppedisano’s masterful control of his recordings immediately harkens back to Wiggins’ equally painstaking documentations, as do the highly variant sounds residing in a spacey quadrant nonetheless redolent with terrene landscapes.

Should you not be quite as zoned as me and other prognacious bastards, be neither esotericized nor daunted by citations of past-master sonic surrealists because there are elements of Fripp & Eno’s groundbreaking duet work present as well, the opening cut, “Breathe”, a kind of cross between later King Crimson and No Pussyfooting, with a good deal of avant-prog continuing as the quintet of songs progresses. A couple decades ago, I coined the term ‘incidentalist’ to embrace this ilk of work, as everything here is episodic amid individual elements of short duration, yet holds together magically, far more so than the term might suggest.

This is not easy art to produce as its qualities are the most esoteric in all sound production, rooting ultimately in John Cage and the 60s Nonesuch electronicist pioneers, not to mention the remarkable ONCE Festivals, and that’s precisely why I cover it: because, goddammit!, there’s nowhere near enough material on this level being produced, and there should be far FAR more. Evolution depends on it!…or at least the hedonistic satieties of sonic omnivores like myself and hopefully you.

Man cannot live by Butch Morris alone.

-Mark S. Tucker

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best of ’15 list: Perfect Sound Forever

best of ’15 list: AMN

top album of 2015, Randy Branch:

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and we’ve had some nice blog/radio play as well.

We’ll post more stuff as it comes in!