Randy Greif

2024 stock. Alice In Wonderland, by Los Angeles, California composer and musician Randy Greif, is a gripping and imaginative telling of Lewis Carroll’s classic story. Using electronics and altered acoustic sounds, along with more traditional instruments, Greif creates a dark and beguiling atmosphere that captures the listener’s imagination. The spoken text is deconstructed into indecipherable phonemes, or laid into rhythmic, musical structures roughly approximating songs. At times, the sonic backdrop is used in a cinematic style behind electronically manipulated voices. Running about six hours, the work was created to move within the real-time cycles of a psychedelic experience. Although the original story has many layers of meaning, Greif intends this interpretation to include some that may be beyond the scope of the original, such as a little girl’s shift from childhood to adolescence, and our species’ evolution into technological beings. This is not your father’s audiobook. Unless your father was Timothy Leary.

The CDs are presented in tall DVD case, with and 8 page color booklet. Most interesting to collectors are the “Alice in Wonderland” trading cards published in conjunction with the release. Sixty different cards have been created, each one corresponding to one of the sixty tracks on the CDs. The image on each card evolves from the last, like the frames of an animated film. The cards have each been printed in different edition sizes so that only 410 complete sets are possible. Five cards are included with each CD box set, but the cards are also sold in packs of 10, in the tradition of collectible trading cards. Randy Greif has released nearly two dozen CDs, LPs and cassettes of electronic soundscapes under his own name, as Shadowbug 4, and with the group Static Effect. He has collaborated on projects with Robin Storey (Rapoon), Nigel Ayers (Nocturnal Emissions), Dan Burke (Illusion Of Safety), R. Kitch (I.A.M. Umbrella / Stylus / His Masters Voice), Anna Homler, Kenji Siratori, Brad Cooper and Atom Smith. In recent years he has moved into film production. 2003 saw the DVD release of “Paraliminal”, a collection of three short pieces, and in 2006 he directed, “The Three Trials”, a surreal film about a nun who finds herself in a number of distressful situations before being rescued by a monster who later transforms into human form (and satisfies her in every way possible).