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Lost in Rooms

by Lutz Glandien
ReR Megacorp, Thornton Heath, UK, 2003
CD-ROM,ReR LG3,
£11.50
Distributor’s Website: http://www.rermegacorp.com.

Reviewed by Mike Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

The radio personality Ann Arbor, named after the town where she attended university, has a show on the Silicon Valley station KFJC-FM(http://www.kfjc.org) where she reads twenty minutes of fiction or memoirs during morning rush hour "because [she] used to like it when people read to [her]." Listening to Lutz Glandien's
Lost in Rooms, this reviewer thought the CD could fit on her show, not only for its short segments of spoken memoirs by a man named Daelik. Ann Arbor also likes Detroit techno, and over half of Lost in Rooms is a collection of danceable musical tracks with chopped vocals in the mix.

Daelik expounds on "The House" in a monotone comparable to Bruce Pavitt's recollections of "Debbie" on the cassette anthology
Sub Pop 5 (1981). The "Four Bedrooms" slips a beat behind the voices in a way reminiscent of another project of that era, David Byrne and Brian Eno's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts". On the Daelik-centered cuts, Glandien privileges the linear coherence of the Canadian dancer's tales of house and home and evoked feelings above all other sounds. "Tightrope Walker" provides Daelik some sound effects like a 1930s radio drama. Yet Glandien works very differently in adroitly-constructed dance tracks. On these, rather than sentences, the composer prefers sampling discarded diphthongs and fricatives, the small software objects of spoken language. "Two of My Sisters" weaves these into a sputtering rhythm akin to Pink Floyd's "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Grooving with a Pict" (1969). Cuts percolate with the beat of "All the Roads" and the jazzy dance "Into a Better Room", or——like the clamorously-climaxing "The Last Room"——are potential soundbeds waiting for texts. "Like This" is distinguished by Chinese language samples before it ends with an accordion or harmonica reverie, while "And They Sunk" is licked by a whispering, murmuring voice, distant and far from shelter.

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Updated 1st October 2004


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