Exotic Percussion

by Eugene Chadbourne Endure, if you will, an entire army squadron marching into the cool music den the moment the needle hits the vinyl. Let them stomp up and down on the freshly reupholstered furniture with their muddy boots. Let the contingent of military snare drummers sharpen their sticks, like the wooden stakes of vampire hunters, and let them drive these stakes deep into the heart of the turntable. Let an additional army come in to clean up anything left over; after all, this is Phase Four stereo. Such an ordeal would be nothing compared to what faithful laboratory assistant Igor has gone through trying to complete his collection of easy listening albums from the '50s and '60s involving percussion. "All Americans of a certain generation have these records somewhere in their houses," he is fond of saying. "It is just a matter of waiting for them to die, then finding the records." Not always patient about the wait, Igor's situation brings to mind the cartoon of the vultures with the caption "Patience my ass, let's kill something." Hopefully nothing indiscreet was involved in the acquisition of this side by the famous British conductor Stanley Black, the percussion trail having led from Ping Pong Percussion to the kinder and gentler Persuasive Percussion to a steaming approach described by the album title of Exotic Percussion. In terms of exotica, the picture of the girl on the front cover is the high point, and so it should be. Otherwise everything related to Phase Four stereo gets more play than anything to do with the music on the lavish, slick gatefold cover. The number "4" is printed much larger than anything else, including the girl, which doesn't seem right. The dozen tracks crafted by Black are not mentioned until the back side. No musicians are credited at all, although names of instruments are mentioned in the track-by-track description. The entire gatefold is given over to the wonder of the Phase Four system. The main comment that should be made about Phase Four is that it could be the only such development in music playback systems in which the best thing about it seems to be the graphic depiction of how the system works, black-and-white artwork that takes up the bottom third of one gatefold sleeve and is worth the price of admission, provided this was scored on the used record pile for a tariff a bit less than a cappuccino.... Read More...