Remember that weird childhood game of sitting in the dark on Halloween, passing around "human body parts" -- carrots for fingers, peeled grapes for eyeballs and chilled spaghetti for guts? The mere power of suggestion (combined with too much candy corn) could make for a rollicking evening of disgusting fun. For electronic artists Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, however, such tactile simulation gives way to cold, audio reality on their fourth full-length album, an experimental marriage of art-house ambience and the digitally mastered sounds of surgery.
Apparently, every snip and tuck heard on this release comes from the duo's sitting in on various medical procedures with DAT recorders (patient/physician identities are not disclosed due to confidentiality). Like the operations themselves, the results vary, but by giving as much emphasis to process as product, Daniel and Schmidt stretch the boundaries of reconstructive dub, both literally and figuratively. "Lipostudio (And So On...)" suctions the salty phat from a impersonal techno beat until the thing deflates -- slurp, slurp. "L. A. S. I. K." manipulates tones from a laser keratotomy operation, something of an unblinking exercise in hum-distorted tolerance. "California Rhinoplasty" -- the disc's longest-running track at ten minutes -- is composed entirely of sounds recorded during forehead lifts, chin implants and shnoz jobs (exempting the bird-twittering sounds of a nose flute). Unconventional textures likewise abound during "Memento Mori," which samples percussive sounds from a human skull and a goat spine.
Crediting such instrument manufacturers as Bard Parker Scalpels and Draeger Anesthesia Ventilators, the two slice and suture their way through a style of music that is far from bloodless, next to seamless, and never lacking for visceral fascination. It even manages to be melodically cheerful at times, oddly enough.
One piece of amusing non-medical dance filler -- "Spondee" -- features the voice of an audiologist in a hearing-test booth reading a list of phonetically balanced words: pancake, sunshine, cowboy ("spondees," with equal stress on the first and second syllables) to the background frequencies of a hearing-aid test; if one fails to notice the screeching rooster and clanging trains, a Belltone wouldn't help anyway. The collection's starkest moment, "For Felix (And All the Rats)," finds the duo plucking and bowing the bars of a rat cage -- a meditative tribute to the countless critters who die in the name of science and cosmetics daily.
Dining music at its worst, Chance to Cut(dedicated to the musician's fathers, themselves medical doctors) nonetheless scores huge points for its sheer ingenuity and for the creators' willingness to broaden an organic sound palette beyond anything Kraftwerk ever attempted with mere machinery.
Admit it: You'd love for someone to make music with your skull.
