Terry Fox

An epic entry into the drone music canon, this work from conceptual/performance/sound artist Terry Fox inhabits a zone of long-string drone avant garde action more readily associated with the likes of Ellen Fullman or Paul Panhuysen and his Het Apollohuis productions, though Fox marks out a singular stance for himself here. Featured in the legendary Alan Licht's Minimal Top Ten. Side two's Rallentando occupies the more expected territory of the two, teasing out a transportive range of vibratory excitation from rosin stroked piano wire, two cellos and a double bass. This occupies a region not at all dissimilar to the autumnally tinged universe of stacked and strafed string drag advanced by Richard Skelton projects like Caroussel, Harlassen or A Broken Consort and is a damn lovely thing to behold, but it's side A's Berlino that genuinely startles. Comprised of six sets of sounds cross-cut against each other at varying degrees and times, Berlino is both a singularly unnerving and singularly fascinating listen. Unpacking the highly involved..

Side 1: Berlino
(A compilation of prerecorded tapes of found sounds and three different piano wire instruments, a kind of aural geography of the Berlin Wall; recorded in San Francisco, Liège, and Berlin between 1978-88.)

Side 2: Rallentando
(Three piano wires, attached at one end to a metal radiator and to a wall and stairwell at the other, two cellos and a double bass; recorded live at Het Apollohuis, Eindhoven, Aug. 13, 1988.)

Created, performed and produced by Terry Fox.