专辑简介

by François CoutureHugh Davies' prior solo album (his first) was released by the German label FMP back in 1981. And yet the man has been active in contemporary and free improv music since the 1960s. It goes to say that Warming Up With the Iceman came as a necessity: to raise awareness of the instrument builder's work and to document his idiosyncratic music. Recorded over a couple of days in a Cologne studio, the album features seven compositions never before recorded but going as far back as 1968 ("Shozyg I"). Davies performs on a variety of homemade instruments that combine rods that can be excited in many ways (tapped, scratched, bowed), various surfaces, contact microphones, and electrical circuitry. They produce a wide array of electro-acoustic sounds, but for the most part relate more to the sound palette of early musique concrète (coarse, almost brutal) than, say, Keith Rowe's table guitar. The pictures of the instruments included in the booklet actually raise more questions than they solve. Davies not only plays his inventions, he has written pieces to get the most out of them, shifting to different sections and possibilities, aiming for a structure than can be allusive at times. Ironically, the two best tracks are the two takes of "Music for a Single Spring," where the artist makes the most (noise) out of a very simple apparatus. If people like Mark Applebaum have refined the technique, this album still holds a lot of mysteries and will challenge (and fascinate) fans of otherworldly sounds. If anything evoking scraped metal gives you goosebumps, please avoid.