Following the widely acclaimed 3LP collection,
Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties,
Unseen Worlds has compiled a second, 2LP
collection of favorite and unreleased Carl Stone
works. Electronic Music from the Eighties and
Nineties presents the soothing, hallucinatory side of
Stone's slow-evolving, time-bending composition.
While we can't always identify the source, we can
hear that his sounds come from somewhere, and
that there is a "correct" or "complete" version of
them in theory; and so we can hear when they are
being changed. What drives Stone's music is the
flow that he draws out of those differences: the way
an Indonesian gamelan morphs into a chorus built
from one female vocalist over the course of "Mae
Yao"'s twenty-three minutes, the surprise
emergence of a Mozart chorus out of the synths and
skip-glitches of "Sonali," or the slow, ambient
evolution of "Banteay Srey". "Woo Lae Oak," issued
in a single side edit for the first time, is an
exception. Its samples - a tremolo string and a bottle
being blown across the top like a flute - are simple
in the extreme. Yet the Stone hallmark is clearly
present, he locates the inherent emotional
properties of the sounds - the tingling anticipation
of the string and the calm nobility of the wind - and
takes them into unexpected expressive territory
