Guardian Alien - Spiritual Emergency

6.0 - USA - 2014

In one of his novels, Kurt Vonnegut describes modern art as a conspiracy between artists and the rich to make poor people (or at least those without sufficient reserves of cultural capital) feel dumb. I felt something similar when listening to the last five minutes or so of this album's otherwise pretty-damn-good concluding title track wherein the listener is treated to squalls of frenetic noise with a below-average female voice screaming in the background. It was quite unpleasant. A shame, as this album began with an excellent display of experimental avant-garde-ism.

Opener "Tranquility" takes an intricate, tabla-like percussion riff from drummer/leader Greg Fox and lets it spin out over the course of nine minutes or so. Overtop, a female voice is cut up and rearranged into a collage of stuttering, processed sounds. Following that, we get a trio of shorter pieces that follow a similar process: the arrangement of sounds that would otherwise be more or less noise into a purported cohesive whole. And then the twenty-minute title track which starts out great with some awesome sampled talking from the Czech psychologist Stanilov Grov, before meandering interestingly for a bit and ultimately degenerating into horrible noise (worse, it's boring horrible noise: a headache-inducing "What's Become Of The Baby").

Apparently largely improvised, this is the music of people who haven't learned music, but studied it. And while the results are quite passable, there is an overriding sense that a lot of this is just noise for noise's sake, as if the apparent "unlistenability" is a shibboleth designed to weed out the insufficiently hip. Perhaps I'm being a little too harsh, but then again perhaps this record's just a little too pretentious. Cool voice samples, though.