TAYLOR, GREGORY - Randstad

Randstad is a kind of hermetic diary of a year living in the randstad -- a term the Dutch use to describe their own megalopolis that encompasses Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. In its own way, the work runs contrary to todays assumed absolute limitlessness of musical possibility, favoring a reduced expatriate sonic toolkit (composed of Cycling 74s Max, a modest Eurorack, and a handheld digital recorder). Its entries combine the sounds of a new home (house keys, birds on the terrace, fireworks at the New Year) that are stretched / rotated / folded / spindled / annealed into a set of audio vignettes. The results are snapshots of sensation, location, movement, and image: a score for re-orienting yourself in new, changing environments. To paraphrase Roethke, we learn by going not only where to go, but how to go. The CD includes a download card for Randstad and the bonus EP Trajectum. After a hiatus from the cassette culture movement of the 1980s, Gregory Taylor returned to regular recording and live performance as an improviser in the late 1990s. He has studied central Javanese Gamelan and electroacoustic music at Cornell, UW-Madison, New England Conservatory and the Instituut voor Sonologie, and written for publications such as Wired, Recording, Array, and Option, and hosted RTQE -- a radio program of contemporary audio on WORT-FM since 1986. He currently works for Cycling 74. Randstad is his fourth album for PoL. - Palace Of Lights.