Detailed Reviews [Re:Cooperation - 2003 - "TransCollaboration"]

Re:Cooperation (USA) - 2003 - "TransCollaboration"
(60 min, "Uncle Buzz")

Preamble. According to the CD booklet, "Trans-Collaboration is the five-year project of Re: Cooperation. James (USA) and David (UK) started this project out of mutual interests in looping, having met on The Looper's Delight mailing list. James proposed a joint project with David that would entail the trading of tapes with ideas. Over the following years, the duo mailed the master tapes back and forth, adding new tracks with each new mailing. The end result is the album you now hold in your hands." James's note: "Looper's Delight is an open on-line forum for samplists to discuss different techniques and ideas concerning the looping of music and sound." If you wish to read the other James Sidlo-related reviews, click > here and > here. I earnestly recommend you to read at least the latter of them. I don't know why, but in the press kit of this CD, James called Honey Barbara a pop band. Should this mean that his loopy creation-collooperation is progressive? My note - Re: Looper's Delight. The neologism, Collooperation, is the derivative of the following words: collaboration, looper, and cooperation. (c 2003 VM: All rights reserved:-)

The Album. Well, now I know that the music, presented on "Trans-Collaboration", isn't progressive. With the exception of Time To Spare (5), the contents of the first half of this album (tracks 1 to 7) are about an electric and bass guitars-based Ambient that, nevertheless, has a very synthetic feel to it. Which is certainly due to the fact that the number of looped and preliminarily sequenced solos is larger than that of genuine ones (which includes overdubbed ones). I think this music would fit well for popular science films and, probably, can be used as a background for meditations and quite successfully. As for me, such a simple, slow, and monotonous music that is featured on the first half of the CD affects me like a somnambulant. With the exception of Texas Tree (13), which, according to its contents, should've been placed on track 5, instead of Time To Spare, and vice versa, the second half of the CD, in its turn, is notably richer in ideas and sound than the first one. Most of the tracks from 8 to 15 were performed with bright solos of electric and bass guitar and passages of either an acoustic or semi-acoustic guitar, and also with a drum machine that, though, sounds terrible. While the synth-like passages are present on most of the tracks on this album in general, the piano-like passages are heard only on There & Back & There Again (8). Episodically, shades of Indian meditative-like music appear on a few of the tracks on the second half of "Trans-Cooperation", though they are really evident only on Re: Cooperation-2 (12). This and both of the last pieces on the CD: Never Enough: parts 1 & 2, are at least very beautiful. And although these three are undoubtedly the best tracks on the album, they're, nevertheless, just slightly less monotonous and, thus, more interesting than the other tracks bunched up on the second half of the CD. As for those on the CD's first half, I have already forgotten of their existence.

Summary. Overall, this album is certainly much better than any pushbutton music, as well as that by the supergroup > Cipher. Nevertheless, in my honest opinion, all these sampled and taped loops and sequences, as well as sound designs, sound sculptures, etc don't have any future and simply cannot concern music, which, I believe, is a live entity. Music must be composed and not built-up by looping, etc. Well, I have once again expressed my attitude towards manipulations with music.

VM: February 5, 2003