KRZYSZTOF KNITTEL-LAPIS/LOW SOUNDS, LP, 1987, POLAND

This album will only ring an obscure bell for the handful of you out there with a working knowledge of the esoteric world of gallery edition LP's, as this album in it's original edition (encased in a cage of chicken wire) was prominently featured in the genre defining book Broken Music that this crowd uses as a bible, along with a passel of other LP's in equally curious packagings from the Polish Alma Arts imprint. Knittel's compositions evidently span the worlds of orchestral, choral and chamber musics in addition to electronic and electroacoustic works, though this is the only artifact of his I've encountered over the years, and the electronics heard here give off a whiff thats anything but sterile. I'll freely admit that the lengthy Low Sounds that encompasses side two has resoundingly failed to set my world on fire (a case of truth in advertising, just low lying thrums....should give a woodie to all the onkyo obsessives out there, though....), but the A side....aaah...the A side's a bloody delight, the extended electronic confection that is "Lapis" airily whizzing about a sound world thats largely tonal, unexpectedly cheerful and ferociously blippy, it's slip 'n' slide synthetic interweavings immediately evoking several things for me, none of them particularly commonplace, from obscure library LP's like Michel Gonet's Futura or Patrick Vasori & Jan Yrssen's Transparence to Luc Marianni's Six Synthetic Suites, posted recently by moi.
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