Carl Stone
Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties

★★★½

Carl Stone has a thing for restaurants apparently, as each song title in the majority of his releases are tributes to some of his favorite. This is a compilation of his early works and it's pretty daunting at two and a half hours long. I've listened to his '92 album Mom's some months ago, and even one song from this is on that release. Otherwise this is all new to me. 

"Sukothai" is probably what will either draw a lot of people in or spit the others out, personally it drew me in. The Baroque harpsichord being layered over and over to what seemed like hundreds of times, was really mind numbing and best experienced with headphones. The third and fourth tracks, "Dong Il Jang" and "Shibucho" both use rapid samples that recall the sounds of an early Steve Reich or digital Oneohtrix Point Never. It's a sort of midpoint between the two periods in electronic music, and "Shibucho" is a bit funkier than anything I've heard from loops like this.

For me, the indisputably best song is "Kuk Il Kwan", a masterpiece from Stone, it lasts for about twenty nine minutes and never during a second of that does it seem dull or repetitive. It's from the future for sure, unlike a lot of other music I've heard before. There's points in here where I literally think Arca is playing, it has those stabbing points. There's some hypnotic vocal loops along with textures that automatically appeal to me. Which reminds me of something like a Graham Lambkin record. It's basically a journey from the depths of the ocean to the rampaging coast all the way into an empty candlelit church with stained glass that opens up to the starry night sky and eventually into the stars themselves. 

If you were to listen to one song from this album, make it that. The rest is quite lacking really after that turning point, the two remaining tracks are just gong like drones that aren't different from anything I've heard previously. Stone is a versatile musician and this is a great example of that versatility. 

Favorite Song: Kuk Il Kwan

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