Oliver Schroer ( )
Restless Urban PrimitiveBig Dog Music ( )
In the name of improvisation, I have a few comments on this CD.
Ry Cooder meets a fiddler in a scrapyard.
This violin is like a contour drawing it traces the edges of objects, an apprehension of a feeling...Yo Yo Ma but with more chaos.
Kind of feels like the soundtrack to Kandahar (2001 Iranian film): Paris to Kyiv-esque.
He's drawing pictures with a butterknife. Like watching the shore pan away when you're on a boat.
Summer bugs: the music of insects (Restless Urban Primitive has a track of just crickets and Schroer whistling in the kitchen!) tunneling through a sweater, what it's like to be a flea.
This album is an event more than it is designed for an event. In the artist's own words, it is "...a unique musical snapshot of my post-traveling brain," more a feeling of having existed in different places than an adoption of musical styles (as many traveling musicians tend to do).
A folk-y 2002 Bach. I often think of Bach's compositions as sounding like ribbons being pulled through someone's brain...folding itself into a pile of curls on the floor. This is fiddle music but it bends itself in the same way, it traces the outline of objects, people and places.
It feels like crashing bones and notes, hovered broken bee wings scratching against each other like glass, scratching that becomes a pattern.
--- this CD is to music as this review is to formal writing style --------
RECOMMENDED TRACKS: "Kitchen Interlude", "Door Fragment", "Restless Urban Primitive"
Reviewer: Shannon Doyle, CFBU Radio, St. Catharines, ON
By Shannon Doyle
Apr 27, 2002