Impostor Orchestra – Heliopause

I love the tone of this album, how unsettling and bizarre it is, with borderline electroacoustic experiments appearing next to 70’s-sounding space/lounge/free-jazz/cinematic weirdness, and some electro/techno snippets here and there as well. The trouble is the album’s choppy mid-section (which seems to replicate what it would be like to intercept clips of Martian radio/television broadcasts), where no track tops the 1:00 mark. It reminds me of Naked City’s “hardcore miniatures” in principle, but here the concept is less effective. You just start to get into a groove and then poof, it’s over and on to the next bit of Tenor’s noodling. Many of these brief tracks could have been fleshed out into full pieces and the result would have been more satisfying, especially since the album clocks in at a paltry 37:12. That said, I’ve never heard a release quite like this, so it stands in my collection as a one-of-a-kind album. It’s one of my go-to CDs when I need to shake things up a bit.