Heinz Obermite - Los Angeles, CA
I want to introduce my HORDES of Fans and Admirers® to this singularly One-of-a-Kind album just, well... “introductorily,” if you will. That is, I’m not doing - here - any kind of full review: I just want to ...Break-the-Ice... to You All as, it’s just SO deep(!) and SO DUCKING-WELL-PRODUCED(!) (AND “Auto-Corrected”) ...(Kurt Morgan, I’m lookin’ at YOU, eh? 😉 😁)... and don’t get me started on the performances(!) - Magical Perfection(!), the Lot! Especially when you consider the previous recordings I’ve heard from all these performers - I mean, it’s a tad different from other music I’ve heard them perform ‘ere now: they’re branching out onto previously unclimbed tree limbs, eh? Oh(!), and I suppose you can’t tell what it is I’m talking about as... the cover doesn’t say but, this is Chris Opperman’s “Chamber Music from Hell,” arrived only this week, directly from his own, Synclavier-Caressing® fingers! 😉 😁
Let me just presage anything I might say about this with the notion that, having a fair amount of familiarity with these musicians, I was well-within my rights to expect a ...”Work of Magical Genius”... howEVER(!), they have - ALL You Guys® have, SO FAR EXCEEDED(!) any expectations I might have had that... well... I am temporarily speechless (despite all indicators to the contrary 😉 😁 😇). In fact, I was so thrilled with it that, I took a full-stop around Track 11-ish as... I just had to take a day to digest and absorb what I’d heard so far. I’ll attempt a Formal Review once I’ve finished it once-through. Or at least, I THINK I will...
The “introduction” I want to make to my Friends’-List is an excerpt from Chris Opperman’s own liner notes that knocked my socks right off. He has written some profoundly involved liner-notes that dig into the depth of his musical concept - there’s quite a few pages of them. Hopefully all involved will not mind overly-much if I “give away the punchline” to my readers... any number of them might be so “musically-unadventurous” as to look askance at the title, “Chamber Music from Hell,” wondering what on earth he was thinking of or trying to sell to them.
Well(!) - there’s quite the wonderful backstory to this music that might be worth exposing - and not just the notion of a tribute to Frank Zappa’s, “Jazz from Hell.” It’s deeper than that idea: this album is a complete and self-contained Science Fiction story... SO well-conceived that I think it ought to be submitted to the various Sci-Fi awarding-committees that hand out the Hugo & Nebula Awards®, namely the Pulitzer-equivalents of Science-Fiction authorship. They DO have categories for things like film & TV shows... seems like they’d be able to accept musical performances as well. Chris(?), Kurt(?)... seems like something your agents maybe ought to consider doing - an entry submission, eh? I’ll do it for them if they thing that’s too far left-field...
The “punchline-giveaway” I was referring to has to do with that Sci-Fi story, namely, with the “Robots” and the “AI” inheriting Planet Earth after the demise of Humanity - a post-apocalyptic reality, if you will. Those Robots & AI refer to the Humankind they only know about from the ruins - physical & virtual - left-behind as the “Analog people.” In introducing the notion of this music, the liner notes are the narration of various synthetic intellects, namely, “The Lonely AI,” “The Art-History Robot” and “The AI on the Street.”
Some one of them describes in the very beginning this important detail: “Last email of final analog person at minddeath: “We have turned our planet into Hell.” Planet now ourhome. Share with birds and insects. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Hell.” And THAT(!), I thought, was SUCH an excellent concept to wrap some - any(!) - music around that... well... that’s why I conTINUE in speechlessness (despite all continuing indicators to the contrary)...
The section of Chris’s liner-notes I wanted to share with everyone comprise some of the best News-Editorial Writing i’ve ever encountered from someone outside of the Journalistic Persuasion®... He sums up that profession and Our Times® SO WELL(!) in a “broadcast” from “The AI on the Street”...
“After the twin deaths of expertise & journalism in the mid-21st century, the cable news networks devolved solely into peddling vast conspiracy theories. These theories were often indefensible and required the analog people(s)to hold the conflicting view that their perceived enemies, who they believed to be uneducated and ignorant beyond belief, were also competent enough to expertly pull off conspiracies involving thousands of people who never broke rank or blew the whistle.
“Once there was truly no [longer any] journalistic oversight, the cable news networks stopped using reporters and guests altogether and just had their computers algorithmically generate “The TV People.” This allowed them to broadcast stories even more enraging and erroneous since none of the people reporting could be targeted by physical mobs, only virtual ones. It was also simple enough to set up social media pages for them entirely run by advanced AIs so the analog people(s) could “speak truth to power” to their heart’s content. After all, “The TV People,” being AIs, had no feelings to hurt and never needed to be seen in public.”
I want to point out that this is SO CLOSE to the ACTUAL BONE of our times that it simply causes shivers up my spine - especially what he writes after this as part of the same “AI on the Street” narration. Because after this, he goes on to extrapolate predictions based on these premises but, if I share that with you all, it’ll be separately because, otherwise, I’ll end up with an enTIRE Sci-Fi Novel printed on my FB-page and... well... I dunno... I was going somewhere with that idea but I forgot where, so... I’ll just stop here and, for those of you who made it all the way through, hope you were as entertained as I was and... umm... ...”BOOM-Shaka-lakka,” eh?? 😉 😁