Big City Orchestre* – A Child's Garden Of Noise

Titles are "A Child's Garden Of Noise", "Noizeallday"; "Popub's Party"; "Go" & "The Pirate Song". There's no indication where each track begins or ends, so it's all guesswork. The first side kicks off with an almost Pythonesque lecture on noise enhanced by a Folksy song. The absurdity of the dialogue & the accompanying sounds bring to mind RUNZELSTIRN & GURGELSTØCK's first vinyl album. I'm sure some of the dialogue is 'found' but much of it sounds just too weird. This is tape cut-up at it's very best. The second side is a collection of playground rhymes, harkening towards LEMON KITTENS, THE RESIDENTS & NURSE WITH WOUND in style, utilizing children's voices and instruments found in clasrooms to create a sound simultaneously naive, innocent & chilling. The old crackly recordings of piano & voice on the second track sound like music boxes all playing harmoniously contra to one another. The next piece uses found sound & loops, scratching sounds of mechanical toys winding down, fragments of piano to form a peaceful cacophony. The last track sounds like a nightmare equence from some 'B' movie. Innocent voices take a swipe at Barney The Dinosaur. I've known about this group for a long while now, but this is the first chance I have had to actually hear them. And everything they tell you is true - these guys take cutting and pasting audiotape to a whole new level. The humour is richly absurd, and the overall effect is both pleasing and curiously relaxing. If you can still get copies of this, we'd recommend it.

Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.