Wall and Rodgers have worked together informally and irregularly for the best part of two decades, but it has been since Wall took the leap into improvisation, roughly five years ago, that the potential for their collaborations to become something more solid has evolved. So the pair have worked together, either just informally in Wall's studio or out playing live gigs since 2006, and they have produced a body of material that Wall has then sculpted into the composition that appears on the CD. The sounds that we hear then are the output of that work together. Although in places the mark of improvisation is clear the majority of what we hear has been carefully picked out and resampled by Wall alone into the structure presented here. So while recordings of improvisations have been used in the final work, its important to note that this album is essentially a composition pieced together over a period of months rather than years.This album has a real menace to it, a hint of violence, and a thoroughly unsettling overtone. This comes partly from Wall's sounds, which have taken on a sharp, aggressive feel, with brutally piercing tones matching sudden swerves from one sonic extreme to another, but Rodgers' contributions also play a big part. Both Wall and Rodgers are outsiders looking in on the conventional art and music worlds, neither of them seek to hide a real sadness that has developed into a bitterness over the state of today's modern world. While Wall's anger can be heard in the music, Rodgers' spoken word parts are equally acerbic. He sounds constantly on edge, his voice slurs in places, growls in others and has a gruff bite to it that is only amplified by the cheap dictaphones used to record many of his parts. His words move between a bitterly spat-out stream of angry obscenity-ridden disgust and a carefully worked out and scripted sense of surrealism all wrapped up in a Beckettian verbal sensibility.


There is a hint of automatic writing to his words, though Rodgers is at pains to make clear that there are no stream of consciousness practices at work, everything is carefully planned here.This CD is a fascinating collection of sounds and words that reflects the personalities of the duo perfectly. Wall keeps most of Rodgers spoken parts intact and untreated, and builds his sounds around themworking alone and only approving the recordings stage by stage with Rodgers every so often. Its maybe not one for the faint-hearted, and it will doubtlessly annoy those that might be expecting Wall to have just picked up from where Cphon ended. Its as good a document of the kind of work Wall is currently involved in as is possible, a great introduction to Alex Rodgers work and a fine piece of music that constantly hints at collapse, nudges at the borders of what computer composition is supposed to sound like.' label info