Search - Bob Ostertag, Fred Frith :: Sooner Or Later

Sooner or later the world will realise

Meho Krljic | Srbija bate | 02/25/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I got this album on tape from a friend some years ago, described as "the wierdest album he has ever heard", and he himself was into some strange stuff. Actually, "Sooner or Later" surpassed all my expectations. Based around a vocal sample of a Salvadorian boy burying his father killed by government troops backed by US, this album was a stunning, hair-raising work of art for me (I was helpfully unaware of the conceptual/ political content and able to concentrate on the music instead). To hear boy's expressive, fragile voice exploded into tiny fragments, looped, scattered, reversed, pitch-shifted, superimposed etc. is a unique experience and a mind-altering one. There's some Fred Frith's guitar samples in the second track, all fine but nothing can be compared with hearing human voice progressively being stripped of its meaning and intention and transformed into pure sound beauty. The cadences in the voice, the unwanted cracks, the parasite noises (shovel hitting the dirt, a fly buzzing around) all become powerful, passionate music. Ostertag succeeds in turning unimportant details of a recording into building blocks of one of the most intensive musical experiences you are likely to have. By turns entrancing, ritual, industrial like, aggressive or simply scary, "Sooner or Later" is a jewel of my record collection (already boasting a bunch of Ostertag's releases), available now reissued in a fantastic metal box record-collectors-bating packaging. A work of a genius, a record that could change your way of listening to music and sound."