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LP
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FTR 691LP
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"Another splendid album of avant hi-jinx and shreddery from keyboard whiz, Liz Durette. Primordial Soup is her fourth album (first was a cassette), and the second for Feeding Tube. It is the follow-up to 2020's most excellent Delight (FTR 504LP) and heads into somewhat different stylistic turf, whilst maintaining Durette's high levels of keyboard invention. If Delight was created while Liz was thinking about Romantic-era waltzes, then Primordial Soup owes some of its strategic approach to the delicate webs of ornamentation generated by French Baroque composers, as well as certain Eastern scales Liz was pondering. The pieces are all melodic as hell, but Liz describes them as having a 'simpler tonal structure' than her previous albums, even though they employ the Baroque habit of ornamenting the main lines with tangles of filigree. Of course, it sounds nothing like Baroque music per se, but the technical aspects of the style allow her the ability to expand basic themes in a variety of seemingly oblique directions. The music often veers off into other dimensions of there, before returning to the basic threads around which it was built. In this respect, Liz's approach recalls the weirder end of jazz-based solo synth improvisation, where a kind of retro-futurist duality often functions in a similar manner. But it would be wrong to infer that this is a serious sounding album, no matter how rigorous its dream-time infrastructure might appear. There are folkloric passages with inflections that are more in line with flute music from Rajasthan or Myanmar than any known Baroque figures, and the music on Primordial Soup has a taste of the same time-bending/shape-shifting qualities that powered the music of Warner Bros. cartoons. The results may not be as serious as your life, but they're a gas-and-a-half to listen to. So dig right in. The soup is fuckin hot." --Byron Coley, 2023 Edition of 500.
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LP
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FTR 504LP
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"A very whacked new outing from Baltimore keyboard genius Liz Durette. Her earlier albums had a certain avant jazz approach, tempered perhaps by certain new music proclivities. And while I do not doubt she still has the chops for such things, Delight is a horse of an entirely different color. What's here was all done on keyboards, but at times it sounds like insane calliope music for wicked children with a taste for that old waltz beat. The whole first side could be the soundtrack for a surreal film about dead Viennese courtiers high-stepping their way around the Bardo as though it were a hedge maze. The more I listen to the record, the more circular its matrix appears, and the less certain I am of the direction in which gravity is pulling me. No surprise then, to learn that part of Delight's inspiration was drawn from A Genuine Tong Funeral, Gary Burton's amazing '68 LP, comprised of a full set of Carla Bley's wildest early compositions. On the flip, Durette is in a similar fettle, but seems keener on exploring the faux percussive aspects of her 'axe.' This involves the simulation of little people tap dancing on a xylophone, as well as very many other transgressive-if-meditative sonic activities. And they are all done with such flair and attention to detail you really have to wonder what sort of visions Liz has accessed. They seem to exist somewhere between romance and math. The universe of sounds she creates on Delight is wildly complex, but also it appears to operate by a set of congruous rules throughout. Like I said earlier, GENIUS!" --Byron Coley, 2019 Edition of 250.
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