Randy Greif - 1997 - Verdi's Requiem

 

Soleilmoon Recordings – SOL 48  230.95MB FLAC

Verdi’s Requiem is one of Randy Greif’s most slippery acts of appropriation because it does not behave like a cover, a remix, a tribute, or a parody. It uses the name of one of Western music’s great monuments, then immediately makes that monument unreliable. The title points toward Giuseppe Verdi’s massive 1874 Messa da Requiem, a work famous for turning the Catholic mass for the dead into something nearly operatic in its drama, terror, beauty, and theatrical force. But Greif does not simply “reinterpret” Verdi. He builds a false biography around him, then abstracts imagined events from that invented life into sound. The result is less about Verdi than about what culture does with dead masters.

That detail is the key: the events behind Greif’s album are imagined. They did not happen. This makes the record feel like a forged relic, a devotional object with a counterfeit saint inside. Greif is not documenting Verdi’s life. He is making a sound-work out of the space between historical authority and fabricated memory. Once that is understood, the misspelling that appears on some listings, Verdi’s Requim, almost becomes part of the aura. The sacred object has already been damaged by transmission. The archive coughs, and the title comes back wrong.

Released by Soleilmoon in 1997, the album runs six tracks and about fifty-seven minutes: “Verdi’s Requiem - The Easy Listening Part,” “Cavity,” “Rusted Sorrow Of The Old Crane,” “Sunset - For The Control Of The Heart,” “Street Of Crocodiles,” and “Verdi’s Requiem - The Missing Part.” That track list alone tells the listener not to expect a polite electroacoustic homage. “The Easy Listening Part” sounds like a joke sharpened into a tool. “The Missing Part” sounds like an archival wound. “Cavity” suggests absence inside matter. “Street Of Crocodiles” pulls Bruno Schulz’s dreamlike, decaying commercial mythology into the frame. Greif is not rebuilding Verdi’s church. He is opening trapdoors beneath it.

The original Verdi Requiem already had a strange reception history because some listeners found it too theatrical, too operatic, too humanly dramatic for sacred use. That tension gives Greif an opening. Verdi’s work itself stands between church and theater, prayer and spectacle, mourning and performance. Greif takes that instability and pushes it into a late-20th-century sound-art language: electronic disturbance, collage logic, imagined biography, and the sense that reverence becomes more interesting when it begins to malfunction.

What makes Greif’s approach valuable is that he does not merely desecrate the source. Simple desecration would be easy and dull. Instead, he treats cultural memory as a haunted mechanism. Verdi is not attacked so much as multiplied into fiction, artifact, rumor, and signal. The album seems to ask: when we invoke a famous name, what are we actually hearing? The music? The biography? The institution around the music? The centuries of performance practice? The dust of prestige? The listener’s own insecurity before the canon?

This fits perfectly with Greif’s larger body of work. He repeatedly returns to familiar cultural objects, Alice In Wonderland, War Of The Worlds, Verdi, and pulls them away from straightforward representation. He does not adapt them to make them clearer. He adapts them to reveal how strange they already are. Piero Scaruffi called Verdi’s Requiem Greif’s “most powerful and dramatic work” and compared parts of its force to Morton Subotnick’s chaotic electronic scores, which is a useful hint: Greif is not making classical music electronic. He is letting electronic instability infect the idea of classical authority.

Inside the Private Release sequence, this one feels important because it sits at the crossing of archive, fiction, and reverence. The blog itself often works with real objects that gain imaginary charge through placement. A record is factual: title, year, label, format, rip, download. But once placed in the archive, beside other records, images, memories, and strange days, it begins to accumulate fantasy. Verdi’s Requiem does this deliberately. It takes a real composer and surrounds him with unreal events until the boundary between historical gravity and invented meaning starts to shimmer.

That is why the album’s title is not merely borrowed prestige. It is a test. Verdi’s actual Requiem is concerned with death, judgment, terror, mercy, and eternal rest. Greif’s Verdi’s Requiem is concerned with another kind of death: the death of stable context. The great composer becomes material. Biography becomes fiction. Sacred form becomes electronic theater. The listener becomes an archaeologist in a ruin that may have been built yesterday.

As a Randy Greif post, this belongs beside Fragment 56, Oedipus Brain Foil, War Of The World, and In Our Little Bodies, but it has its own peculiar grandeur. Those works explore memory, collaboration, media panic, and the little chamber of the body. Verdi’s Requiem explores the canon as a haunted public body. It asks what happens when a cultural monument is not destroyed, but misremembered on purpose.

The result is not anti-classical. It is anti-stability. Greif treats Verdi like a massive old building whose official entrance is too guarded, so he digs underneath and listens to the pipes, bones, insects, and old stage machinery still moving below the floor.

Verdi’s Requiem is a requiem for certainty: not the death of Verdi, but the death of the idea that any great work ever arrives to us unaltered by myth, error, fantasy, and the hands of later listeners.

Luciano Maggiore & Louie Rice - 2023 - Three Things

 

Adhuman – adh003  285.18MB FLAC

Three Things is almost aggressively plain as a title, which is part of its charm. It does not promise transcendence, terror, virtuosity, or revelation. It gives a count. Three things. Not three songs, not three compositions, not three performances elevated into art-mystery. Things. The word lowers the stakes while secretly making the whole project sharper. What counts as a thing? A task? A joke? A score? A recording? A behavior performed long enough to become music?

Luciano Maggiore and Louie Rice have built a collaborative practice around score-based works, physical actions, vocalisations, prompts, and rules, moving between acoustic and amplified situations. Their own description, repeated across release and event contexts, is beautifully exact: “two people, in a room, doing something.” That phrase has the strength of a good Fluxus score because it removes almost everything except action, relation, and attention. It sounds stupid until one realizes how much art is hidden inside the question of what people are doing, why they keep doing it, and what happens when the doing is framed as listening.

Released in 2023 by adhuman, Three Things consists of “Hissing for White Shoes (#6),” “Phone Work,” and “Pocket Fascinator (#7).” Each piece begins from a simple premise that is funny before it is anything else. In “Hissing for White Shoes,” a drive around London is interrupted by loud hissing whenever the performers pass someone wearing white shoes. In “Pocket Fascinator,” Buchla synthesizer material from EMS Stockholm is played through mobile phone speakers placed in the performers’ pockets as they try to walk in sync with the pulses. “Phone Work” is built from WhatsApp voice recordings exchanged back and forth, each performer mimicking the other until the original source is gradually lost.

That last detail is the secret hinge. These pieces may sound absurd, but they are not casual nonsense. They use absurdity as a tool for studying memory, imitation, public space, timing, embarrassment, and the failure of communication to remain clean. “Phone Work” especially turns the contemporary phone into a folk instrument of distortion. A voice is sent, heard, imitated, returned, misremembered, flattened by compression, and folded into another voice. The original disappears not through violence, but through repetition and care. That is funny, but it is also strangely tender. Two people are listening to each other so closely that the message erodes.

The white-shoes piece is equally smart because it turns urban observation into a private rule-game. Anyone walking through London wearing white shoes unknowingly becomes part of the score. The city is not recorded as neutral environment. It becomes a trigger system. The performers are not documenting the street; they are behaving inside it according to a ridiculous law. The hiss becomes a small anti-social punctuation mark, a snake-note directed at fashion, brightness, cleanliness, or maybe nothing at all. That is where the work has teeth. Its silliness is exact enough to make the everyday world briefly seem over-coded.

“Pocket Fascinator” may be the most physically beautiful idea of the three. The synthesizer does not simply play in space. It rides in pockets, leaking out through tiny speakers while the bodies try to coordinate with it. Large electronic-music history, Buchla, EMS, pulse, synthesis, experimental prestige, gets reduced to little phone speakers near thighs and fabric. The body becomes playback device. Walking becomes choreography. Synchronization becomes both goal and joke. The result points toward dance, minimalism, sound art, and slapstick at once.

The duo’s background with NO PA ON helps explain why Three Things feels so clear in its weirdness. Maggiore and Rice originally came together through an event series at Cafe OTO, performing works by artists such as Alvin Lucier, Robert Bozzi, Ken Friedman, Emmett Williams, and Walter Marchetti before developing their own action-based pieces. That lineage matters because the record is not just “quirky experimental audio.” It comes from a serious investigation into performance scores, conceptual art, sound poetry, minimalist procedure, and the question of how little structure is needed before an action becomes composition.

What makes Three Things work is that it does not dress that lineage in solemn clothing. The adhuman notes are frank about the duo’s embrace of humor and absurdity, while also recognizing the sincerity underneath. That balance is rare. Too much seriousness would suffocate the pieces. Too much comedy would turn them into sketches. Maggiore and Rice let the joke remain audible while still treating the task with commitment. The performance is funny because the performers do not abandon it when it becomes awkward. They stay with the rule. They let the rule make the world strange.

Inside Private Release, this feels especially valuable because it widens the meaning of “experimental.” After noise, industrial, dark ambient, and collage work, Three Things reminds the archive that experimentation can be light on the surface without being light in consequence. It can be a hiss, a pocket speaker, a phone message, a pair of people doing something for reasons that may only become clear after the doing has lasted too long.

There is also a quiet connection to your larger “Fantasy & Reality joining” phrase. These pieces are fantasy systems imposed on ordinary reality. A white shoe becomes a trigger. A pocket becomes a concert hall. A WhatsApp exchange becomes a memory-loss machine. Nothing supernatural happens, yet reality changes because a rule has been placed over it. That is exactly the magic of score-based art at its best: not escape from the world, but a temporary grammar that makes the world misbehave.

Three Things is not grand. That is its strength. It proves that a small premise, obeyed carefully, can open a surprisingly large room. Three things, yes. But each thing is a little machine for making attention laugh at itself and then keep listening.

Randy Greif - 1991 - Alice In Wonderland No. 1

Staalplaat – STCTD 01  417.28MB FLAC

 Alice In Wonderland No. 1 is where Randy Greif’s great rabbit-hole machine begins. Released in 1991 as the first part of a five-disc project, it opens one of the strangest and most ambitious underground adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s story: not a soundtrack, not an audiobook, not a respectful electronic illustration, but a six-hour descent into language, childhood, dream logic, fear, nonsense, and identity failure.

Greif began the larger Alice work around 1990, and the completed project eventually became a five-CD setting of Carroll’s text in which spoken language is repeatedly broken apart into phonemes, rhythm, texture, and almost-song before returning, sometimes briefly, to recognizable words. Soleilmoon’s current description emphasizes the altered acoustic sounds, electronics, traditional instruments, dark atmosphere, and spoken text either deconstructed into sound-particles or arranged into rhythmic musical structures. That description is useful because it catches the central trick: Greif does not simply narrate Alice. He takes the book’s instability seriously enough to make the medium unstable too.

This first disc follows the earliest movements of the story: “The Rabbit Hole,” “Down,” “Curiouser And Curiouser,” “She Looked Down At Her Feet,” “Who Am I, Then?,” “How Doth The Little Crocodile?,” and onward into that first collapse of size, certainty, and self. Discogs lists No. 1 as a 1991 CD, and the track titles already show how carefully Greif anchors the abstraction to Carroll’s opening architecture. The listener is not lost because there is no map. The listener is lost because the map keeps changing scale.

That is why this first volume matters so much. Carroll’s book is often softened by illustration, childhood nostalgia, and cultural familiarity, but the original story is deeply unnerving. Alice is constantly altered, corrected, contradicted, resized, misrecognized, and forced to explain herself inside systems that do not obey adult reason or childhood mercy. Greif restores that threat. “Who am I, then?” is not a cute line in this context. It becomes the record’s central injury. Identity is not something Alice possesses. It is something being tested by sound.

The first disc has the particular excitement of entry. Later volumes may widen the universe, deepen the method, or push further into textual madness, but No. 1 has the shock of crossing the threshold. The rabbit hole is not treated as a visual fantasy tunnel. It becomes an acoustic event: descent as disorientation, falling as rearrangement of language, the body changing before the mind can name what has happened. Greif’s electronics and manipulated voices make the familiar story feel newly unsafe, as if the text has been left too long in a room with machines and dreams.

What makes Greif’s Alice different from ordinary experimental adaptation is that Carroll’s nonsense is not decorated. It is operationalized. Nonsense becomes method. The logic of the work is not “add weird sounds to a weird book.” The logic is: if language in Alice behaves like unstable matter, then the recording must make language physically unstable. Words become particles. Voices become rooms. Rhymes become rituals. A child’s question becomes an electronic wound.

That is also why the project connects so strongly to the rest of the Greif posts. War Of The World treats broadcast as panic-machine. Verdi’s Requiem treats classical authority as fabricated memory. Fragment 56 treats collaboration as dream-remnant. In Our Little Bodies treats the body as a vocal chamber. Alice In Wonderland No. 1 is the seed of all that: a cultural text turned into a laboratory where speech, memory, story, and identity stop behaving.

The scale of the full work matters too. Apple Music lists the 2000 Soleilmoon edition as 60 tracks across five discs, running about six hours and one minute. Santa Sangre’s review notes the commitment required by that length, describing the box as something that twists, turns, and repeatedly makes the listener feel as though a path has returned in altered form. That long duration is not indulgent padding. It is part of the spell. Wonderland cannot be skimmed if the point is to feel what disorientation does over time.

But this first disc can still stand alone as an entrance object. It contains the project’s basic contract with the listener: the story will be recognizable, but recognition will not make it safe. Alice will fall, shrink, question herself, recite badly, and encounter the first symptoms of a world where language has rules but no loyalty. Greif follows her by making the recording itself disloyal to ordinary listening.

Inside Private Release, this post feels like a foundation stone because it expresses one of the archive’s deepest ideas: fantasy and reality do not merely sit beside each other. They join through media. A Victorian children’s book becomes a 1991 experimental CD. A spoken sentence becomes phoneme-dust. A dream becomes a file. A file becomes a blog post. A blog post becomes somebody’s private doorway back into the rabbit hole.

Alice In Wonderland No. 1 is not an adaptation of childhood wonder. It is an adaptation of the moment wonder becomes ontological trouble. The floor gives way, the words misbehave, the body changes size, and the question “Who am I?” stops being philosophical ornament and becomes the sound of the room answering incorrectly.

Randy Greif - 1992 - Alice In Wonderland No. 2

 

Staalplaat – STLTD 02  327.36MB FLAC

Alice In Wonderland No. 2 begins after the initial fall, which gives it a different kind of instability from the first disc. No. 1 was threshold music: rabbit hole, bodily distortion, “Who am I, then?” and the terror of finding the self suddenly negotiable. No. 2 is stranger because Alice is no longer only dealing with her own transformation. She has entered society. Wonderland now has procedures, ceremonies, games, prizes, songs, creatures, conversations, and rules that seem official until examined for more than two seconds.

That makes “A Caucus Race” a perfect opening. In Carroll’s story, the caucus race is a political joke and a logical absurdity: everyone runs in no clear pattern, nobody knows when it starts or ends, and everyone wins. Randy Greif’s larger Alice project is built for exactly that kind of scene. His method of breaking spoken text into phonemes, rhythms, textures, and almost-songs turns language itself into a caucus race. Words run in circles. Meaning competes with sound. Authority announces itself, then dissolves into performance. Discogs lists this second volume as a 1992 Staalplaat CD beginning with “A Caucus Race,” followed by “Prizes! Prizes!,” “Only A Thimble,” and “Hand It Over Here,” so the disc begins in the territory of public nonsense: competition, reward, object, command.

The prize sequence is one of Carroll’s sharp little social machines. The Dodo decides everyone must receive prizes, then Alice has to give away her own comfits and receives her own thimble back as a ceremonial award. It is funny because it resembles society too closely. Institutions often turn circular gestures into rituals of value. Greif’s sound-world makes that comedy more unstable. When the voice is chopped, repeated, sung, stretched, or turned into sonic particles, the official ceremony begins to sound like a malfunctioning broadcast from childhood bureaucracy.

That is what makes Greif’s Alice so powerful. He does not add weirdness to a normal story. He recognizes that Carroll’s story is already a machine for breaking normality. Soleilmoon’s description of the full five-CD work emphasizes electronics, altered acoustic sounds, traditional instruments, dark atmosphere, and spoken text either deconstructed into indecipherable phonemes or arranged into rhythmic musical structures. That is not decoration. It is fidelity by other means. A literal, polite reading of Alice can easily make the book smaller. Greif makes it large again by letting the language misbehave at the level of sound.

Where No. 1 asks “What happens when I change?”, No. 2 asks “What happens when everyone else is already changed and calls it normal?” That is a deeper social terror. Alice is not merely confused by nonsense. She is forced to participate in it. She must accept prizes, respond to strange etiquette, listen to poems, argue with animals, and learn that logic has not disappeared. It has become hostile, theatrical, and unstable.

This is where Greif’s use of voice becomes especially important. The human voice normally promises presence: someone is speaking, therefore someone is there. But in Greif’s work, voice becomes slippery. It can be body, instrument, rhythm, residue, ghost, or broken instruction. Randy Greif’s broader practice has repeatedly moved through electronic music, musique concrète, field recordings, spoken word, computer-generated sound, and collage, with voice treated as unstable material rather than as a trustworthy narrator. On Alice In Wonderland No. 2, that instability matches the story’s social world. The creatures speak, but speech does not guarantee sense. Rules are given, but rules do not guarantee justice. Songs are sung, but songs do not guarantee comfort.

The second volume also begins to show why the full Alice cycle needed so much time and space. A normal adaptation would rush through these scenes as charming episodes. Greif treats them as acoustic laboratories. Each encounter becomes a chance to test what happens when story, sound, childhood memory, and social absurdity are folded together until the listener no longer knows whether they are hearing narrative or being processed by it. Apple Music lists the later Soleilmoon edition of the complete project as 60 songs running about six hours and one minute, and that scale matters because Wonderland is not an idea that can be summarized without losing its effect. It has to accumulate.

Inside the Private Release sequence, No. 2 also feels like a perfect continuation of your “Fantasy & Reality joining” phrase. The caucus race is fantasy, but it is also reality. People really do build systems where motion substitutes for direction, ceremonies substitute for value, and everyone agrees to treat nonsense as order because the alternative would be too embarrassing. Wonderland is not an escape from the world. It is the world with its disguise removed and replaced by a bird wearing authority badly.

That is why this disc may be less immediately iconic than the rabbit-hole opening, but just as important. No. 1 gives the mythic image: Alice falling. No. 2 gives the social mechanism: Alice among procedures. The terror becomes funnier, and the comedy becomes more dangerous. Greif understands that laughter in Alice is rarely harmless. It is the sound made when reason catches itself wearing someone else’s hat.

As an archive post, this volume works because it preserves the serial nature of the project. These discs were originally released separately on Staalplaat between the early 1990s before the complete Soleilmoon box later gathered them into a single monument. Hearing them one by one restores some of that original pacing. Each volume becomes its own room rather than just one-fifth of a box. No. 2 is the room where Wonderland starts organizing itself into absurd society.

Alice In Wonderland No. 2 is not merely the next chapter. It is the moment after private transformation becomes public confusion. Alice has fallen, changed size, questioned herself, and survived the first rupture. Now she has to deal with everyone else. That may be the real nightmare. In Wonderland, the self is unstable, but society is worse: it gives out thimbles, calls it a prize, and expects gratitude.

Randy Greif - 1992 - Alice In Wonderland No. 3

 

Staalplaat – STLTD 003  377.57MB FLAC

Alice In Wonderland No. 3 feels like the point in Randy Greif’s cycle where the rabbit hole fully becomes an acoustic psychology. The opening track, “Sneezing And Howling,” is already a perfect miniature of the disc’s territory: involuntary body sounds, domestic chaos, animal noise, and social discomfort collapsing into one room. Alice has passed through the fall and the caucus race. Now Wonderland becomes more intimate, more hostile, and more bodily.

Discogs’ listing for the complete five-disc set places this third disc at the chapter terrain of the Duchess, the baby, the pig, the Cheshire Cat, and the tea-party world: “Sneezing And Howling,” “Speak Roughly To Your Little Boy,” “A Handsome Pig,” “I’m Mad, You’re Mad,” “Dog,” “A Grin Without A Cat,” “The March Hare,” “They Drew Treacle From A Treacle-Well,” and “The Dormouse Sulkily Remarked.” Those titles are not just chapter markers. They are little trapdoors into Carroll’s most dangerous comedy: parental cruelty turned into nursery rhyme, identity slipping between baby and animal, madness treated as etiquette, and a grin surviving the disappearance of the body.

That “grin without a cat” may be the central image for Greif’s whole project. What is a voice without a speaker? What is a word without a stable meaning? What is a body after its sign has floated away? Greif’s Alice is built from exactly those separations. Spoken text is repeatedly pulled apart into phonemes, rhythmic fragments, textures, and almost-recognizable shapes before returning, sometimes, to words. His broader method has been described as electronic music, musique concrète, spoken word, field recordings, and collage, with this Alice project deconstructing spoken text into pure sound and then returning it to recognizable language.

That is why No. 3 feels more uncanny than the earlier volumes. The first two discs still have a strong sense of movement through story: Alice falls, Alice changes, Alice encounters Wonderland’s first absurd authorities. Here, the scenes become stranger because the boundary between character, sound, and symbol begins to dissolve. The Duchess’s kitchen is not just a place. It is an atmosphere of irritation. Pepper becomes a sonic condition. Sneezing becomes social weather. A baby becomes a pig, which is funny until the transformation leaves behind the uneasy question of whether identity was ever more than temporary arrangement.

Greif is especially suited to this part of the story because Carroll’s language here is already violent in miniature. “Speak roughly to your little boy” is mock-nursery cruelty, sung as if discipline were entertainment. In a normal reading, the song can pass as Victorian absurdity. In Greif’s hands, it becomes part of a larger investigation into how childhood language carries threat inside play. Nonsense is not harmless. It trains the ear to accept unstable authority. It makes cruelty rhyme.

The Cheshire Cat section gives the disc its philosophical bite. “I’m mad, you’re mad” is one of Carroll’s great social diagnoses. The Cat’s logic does not rescue Alice from madness; it universalizes it. Everyone here is mad, including you, because otherwise you would not have come here. Greif’s sound-world makes that line feel less like a joke and more like a recording principle. The album itself behaves madly by ordinary standards, but its madness has structure. It repeats, mutates, folds language into rhythm, lets meaning disappear, then allows a phrase to surface like a face under water.

The tea-party material shifts the disc into another kind of trap: time, manners, repetition, and conversational tyranny. The March Hare, the Dormouse, treacle, remarks, sulking: this is society as broken table ritual. The Mad Tea-Party is not merely wacky company. It is a closed system where rules exist but cannot be used to find justice or clarity. That makes it an ancestor of so many later modern systems: meetings that go nowhere, institutions that speak nonsense fluently, procedures that punish the person asking the reasonable question. Fantasy and reality join at the tea table with crumbs on their sleeves.

The scale of Greif’s full Alice matters here too. The later Soleilmoon edition is listed as a 60-track, five-disc work running just over six hours, originally assembled from the serial Staalplaat releases. That duration lets Wonderland stop being an episode and become an environment. No. 3 benefits from that accumulation. By the time the listener reaches it, the ear has already been trained to accept spoken language as unstable matter. Now Greif can push further into grotesque domesticity, animal transformation, and social madness without needing to explain the rules. The rules have already failed.

Inside the Private Release sequence, No. 3 feels like the hinge between the opening descent and the later trial logic. It is the volume of unstable bodies and unstable social scenes. The baby may be a pig. The cat may vanish but leave the sign of itself behind. The tea table may continue forever because time has been offended and refuses to move properly. These are not just Carroll images. They are archive images too. A file can lose its original body but keep its grin. A post can preserve a title after context fades. A recording can keep speaking after the speaker is gone.

That may be why Greif’s project feels so aligned with this blog. Alice is not only a story about fantasy. It is a story about what happens when systems of meaning become visible as systems. Size, name, manners, time, family, logic, language, authority: all the things reality normally hides inside habit suddenly become weird, theatrical, and negotiable. Greif turns that into sound by making the voice itself negotiable.

Alice In Wonderland No. 3 is the disc where Wonderland becomes less like a place Alice visits and more like a condition she has to breathe. The room sneezes. The baby changes species. The cat abandons its body but leaves expression behind. The tea party traps time in bad manners. And Greif, with a perfectly crooked intelligence, lets language grin after meaning disappears.

Randy Greif - 1992 - Alice In Wonderland No. 4

Staalplaat – ALICE 22  381.80MB FLAC

Alice In Wonderland No. 4 is where Randy Greif’s rabbit-hole machine begins to sound less like childhood disorientation and more like a deranged civic institution. The earlier discs trace Alice’s fall, bodily instability, social nonsense, kitchen violence, vanishing cats, and tea-table imprisonment. This fourth volume moves into a stranger emotional register: mock education, mock sorrow, mock song, and eventually mock law. Wonderland has always had rules, but here the rules begin wearing robes.

The track list makes the shift clear. The 1992 Staalplaat CD includes pieces such as “Sobs Choked His Voice,” “The Whiting,” “The Voice Of The Slugger,” “Beautiful Soup,” “Twelve Creatures,” “A Guilty Thing,” “The King And Queen Of Hearts,” “The Trial’s Beginning,” and “The Jury.” These titles place the disc around the Mock Turtle’s sentimental grotesquerie and the opening machinery of the trial. It is an important movement in Carroll’s story because nonsense begins to imitate institutions more directly: school, song, court, testimony, hierarchy, punishment.

That is why No. 4 feels heavier than its surface absurdity might suggest. The Mock Turtle is funny, but his sadness is theatrical and contagious. He sobs over a past that may not really exist, gives Alice a parody of education, and turns language into an inventory of puns, lessons, and self-pity. Greif is perfectly suited to this material because his Alice project already treats speech as unstable matter. Words do not simply carry meaning. They wobble, repeat, dissolve into phonemes, return as rhythm, and become strange little organisms with teeth.

The full Alice project has been described as a six-hour musical and textural setting of Carroll’s book, with spoken text often deconstructed into pure sound before returning to recognizable language. That method is especially powerful on this fourth volume because Carroll’s legal and educational language already feels corrupted from within. Greif does not need to make it absurd. He only has to amplify its absurdity until the listener hears how close official language can be to nonsense when authority protects it.

“Beautiful Soup” is a perfect example. In Carroll, it is a comic song, ridiculous and mournful, sung by a creature whose very identity is a joke about soup. But in Greif’s hands, such material can stop being merely funny and become uncanny. A little song becomes a ritual of appetite, species confusion, and sentimental performance. Who mourns whom? Who is food? Who is singing? Who is being consumed by the song? Wonderland keeps turning innocence into digestive metaphysics.

Then the trial material begins, and the emotional weather changes again. “A Guilty Thing,” “The King And Queen Of Hearts,” “The Trial’s Beginning,” “The Jury”: suddenly the nonsense world has a courtroom. This is one of Carroll’s sharpest moves. The book’s absurdity does not remain playful chaos. It organizes itself into law. That is more frightening. A mad tea party can be escaped. A mad court claims the right to judge you.

Greif’s sound-world makes that claim unstable. Voices become less trustworthy. Declarations feel like broken ceremony. The court does not sound like reason arriving to settle the dream. It sounds like the dream inventing bureaucracy. This is where fantasy and reality join with a nasty little click. Real institutions often work exactly this way when their language becomes self-protective: procedure continues even after meaning has fled the building.

The disc also demonstrates why Greif’s five-part structure matters. A shorter adaptation might treat these scenes as colorful episodes. Greif allows the listener to arrive worn down by Wonderland’s previous failures: failed identity, failed etiquette, failed time, failed conversation. By the time the trial begins, the listener understands that the court is not an interruption of madness. It is madness becoming official.

That makes No. 4 one of the most socially pointed volumes in the cycle. No. 1 asks what happens when the self changes shape. No. 2 asks what happens when society rewards nonsense. No. 3 asks what happens when bodies, animals, and signs detach from each other. No. 4 asks what happens when nonsense receives institutional authority. The answer is not comforting. It sings, sobs, teaches, accuses, and empanels a jury.

As a Private Release post, this disc belongs beautifully in the Greif sequence because it speaks to the archive’s interest in transmission and altered context. A familiar children’s text becomes a 1992 experimental CD. A courtroom parody becomes a sound-art study of authority. A song about soup becomes a little death ceremony. The archive does not merely preserve the object. It lets the object re-enter the present with new teeth.

Alice In Wonderland No. 4 is the point where Wonderland’s nonsense stops feeling like a private dream and starts behaving like public administration. The Mock Turtle sobs, the songs curdle, the King and Queen appear, the trial begins, and language puts on a wig. Greif hears the danger clearly: when absurdity gains authority, the joke no longer ends with laughter.

 

Randy Greif - 1993 - Alice In Wonderland No. 5

 

Staalplaat – none  338.64MB FLAC

Alice In Wonderland No. 5 is the final disc of Randy Greif’s six-hour rabbit-hole machine, and it has the strange burden of ending something that was never designed to behave like an ordinary story. By this point, Wonderland has already broken identity, language, etiquette, time, domestic space, animal categories, childhood songs, and public authority. The fifth volume brings the whole system into its final form: court.

This is where Greif’s project becomes most openly political without becoming a political record in the narrow sense. A trial is supposed to be the place where confusion is resolved, where evidence is weighed, where speech becomes accountable to truth. In Alice, the trial does the opposite. It formalizes nonsense. The King, Queen, jury, witnesses, poem, evidence, and sentence all become parts of a legal machine whose purpose is not justice, but theatrical authority. Greif’s sound-world was built for this revelation. His whole Alice cycle has treated language as unstable matter: spoken text split into phonemes, arranged into rhythm, dissolved into electronic atmosphere, then returned to recognizable words only long enough to betray the listener’s trust in them.

The track list for the fifth disc makes the closing movement clear. Discogs lists Alice In Wonderland No. 5 as a 1993 Staalplaat CD, and the complete box sequence includes titles such as “Sobs Choked His Voice,” “The Whiting,” “The Voice Of Slagger,” “Beautiful Soup,” “Twelve Creatures,” “Nervous Or Not,” “Witness,” “The Accident Of The Goldfish,” “A Mile High,” and “The Whole Pack Rose Up Into The Air.” The disc begins in Mock Turtle sorrow and song, then moves into the courtroom logic of witness, accident, scale, and collapse.

That movement is important because the ending of Alice is not simply “she wakes up.” Before awakening, Alice grows. Her size becomes a challenge to the court’s authority. She is no longer small enough to be intimidated by the rules. In a story full of unstable bodies, this final growth is not merely another magic trick. It is a change in power. The absurd institution can only function while Alice accepts its scale. Once she becomes too large, the cards become cards again.

Greif’s use of sound makes that collapse feel earned. Across the full project, he does not decorate Lewis Carroll’s text with weird electronics. He makes Carroll’s logic audible. Soleilmoon’s description of the complete work emphasizes electronics, altered acoustic sounds, traditional instruments, a dark atmosphere, and spoken text deconstructed into sound-particles or shaped into rhythmic musical structures. That method matters most at the end, because the trial depends on language pretending to be stable. Greif has spent five discs proving that it is not.

The fifth disc also completes the emotional arc of childhood. No. 1 is the terror of falling into a body and world that no longer obey. No. 2 is the discovery that society has rituals but no reliable sense. No. 3 brings domestic violence, animal transformation, vanishing bodies, and the mad tea-party’s broken time. No. 4 moves through games, beheading threats, royal argument, and the first shadows of judgment. No. 5 reveals the final institution behind it all: a court where nonsense has learned procedure.

That is why “Witness” is such a charged title in this context. A witness is supposed to bring reality into the court. But in Wonderland, testimony becomes another performance. The witness is not a guarantee of truth. The witness is another unstable voice. This connects directly to Greif’s deeper practice, because his work often treats the human voice not as a clear messenger, but as a material that can be chopped, stretched, buried, looped, or made strange. His broader career has been described in terms of electronic music, musique concrète, spoken word, field recordings, and collage, and the Alice project is specifically noted for deconstructing spoken text into phonemes before returning it to recognizable speech.

“The Accident Of The Goldfish” is another wonderful closing-image title. It sounds minor, almost stupid, but that is part of the Carroll/Greif magic. Wonderland’s deepest threats often arrive disguised as trivialities. A goldfish accident should not matter, but inside a court system already detached from reality, anything can become evidence, charge, omen, or procedural noise. The small absurdity becomes dangerous because authority decides to use it.

Then comes “A Mile High.” Scale returns, but now with consequence. Earlier in the story, Alice’s size changes make her confused and vulnerable. At the end, her size makes her dangerous to the dream’s authorities. She is too large for the fiction that has been governing her. Greif’s whole six-hour duration helps this matter. The listener has lived long enough inside the instability that Alice’s growth feels less like a plot event and more like a structural rebellion. The sound-world has trained us to hear language, body, and authority as negotiable. Now the negotiation ends because Alice no longer fits.

“The Whole Pack Rose Up Into The Air” is the perfect final image because it turns the court back into playing cards. Power loses depth. The royal machinery becomes paper, surface, flutter. The institution that terrified the child becomes a pack of cards flying upward. That does not mean the fear was fake. Dreams are real while they hold us. Fantasy and reality join at exactly this point: the cards were “only cards,” but Alice’s fear, confusion, and resistance were real experiences.

The complete Alice cycle has been reissued as a five-disc Soleilmoon box, listed at 60 tracks and about six hours and one minute. That scale is essential. A short version could preserve the plot, but not the altered state. Greif’s achievement is to make the listener inhabit Wonderland long enough that the final collapse has texture. By the time the cards rise, we are not merely following a story. We have been processed by its language-machine.

Inside Private Release, No. 5 feels like the natural capstone to this Randy Greif run. The blog itself is full of fragments, evidence, witnesses, altered media, missing context, resurfaced objects, and strange acts of circulation. Greif’s Alice understands that a familiar cultural object can become unfamiliar again when treated with enough seriousness and enough disobedience. He does not restore Carroll. He reactivates Carroll.

The fifth disc is not the end because everything is solved. It is the end because the dream’s authority fails. Alice wakes, but she does not wake into a world untouched by Wonderland. Nobody who has gone through five discs of Greif’s Alice hears language quite the same way afterward. The trial may dissolve, the cards may scatter, and the child may return, but something has been learned about speech, rules, fear, and scale.

Alice In Wonderland No. 5 is the sound of nonsense putting on a judge’s wig, calling witnesses, mishandling evidence, and then losing its power when the listener finally sees the cards. It closes the cycle not with comfort, but with recognition: authority is sometimes only paper, but paper can still frighten a child until she grows.

Merzbow - 2025 - Animal Magnetism

 

Urashima – none  1.14GB FLAC

Animal Magnetism is one of those Merzbow titles that looks simple until it starts multiplying. It can mean charisma, bodily force, erotic pull, pre-modern pseudo-science, animal presence, magnetic attraction, instinct, compulsion, and the strange fact that sound can pull the nervous system before thought has time to object. For Masami Akita, who has long treated noise not as chaos but as sculptural material, the title is almost a manifesto in disguise. This is not noise floating in abstraction. This is noise with fur, beak, muscle, appetite, and static electricity in its feathers.

Originally released on CD in 2003 by Alien8 Recordings, Animal Magnetism returned in 2025 through Urashima as a deluxe double-LP reissue, remastered by Lasse Marhaug, with the original tracks plus the bonus piece “Quiet Comfort #2.” Urashima’s notes place the album at an interesting point in Merzbow’s catalog: firmly rooted in dense distortion, feedback, and electronic debris, but also unusually structured, varied, and accessible by Merzbow standards. That word “accessible” is always funny with Merzbow, because the gate still has teeth, but here it does apply. The album does not simply flatten the listener. It moves, opens, shifts, pulses, and lets patterns appear inside the blaze.

The 2003 recording context matters. Akita recorded and mixed the album at Munemihouse in Tokyo using computer and guitar, which places it in the era where his digital methods had become central but had not erased the physical animality of the sound. The textures are sharp, intricate, and highly active, yet they still feel bodily. This is not cold laptop noise sealed behind glass. It scratches, clucks, scrapes, surges, and overgrows its own frame.

That animal thread is not accidental. Merzbow’s work has repeatedly involved animal themes, animal-rights concerns, and recordings of his own pet chickens, and Animal Magnetism is one of the releases most directly associated with that world. The bird element changes how the album is heard. What might otherwise register as pure electronic extremity begins to feel inhabited. Noise becomes aviary, cage, yard, panic, motion, territorial call, feathered machinery. Even if the listener cannot always separate source from processing, the knowledge matters. The album is not just “about” animals as imagery. It lets animal presence disturb the supposedly inhuman space of digital noise.

The title track, stretching beyond twenty minutes, is important because it does not simply explode and stay exploded. It develops. It gathers layers, shifts pressure, suggests rhythm, breaks apart, and re-forms with a strange sense of procession. Urashima’s description emphasizes how the album balances harsh noise with a more composed sensibility, and that is the key to hearing this reissue. The density is enormous, but not blank. Noise here behaves less like a wall and more like a living surface. It crawls, molts, flashes, and suddenly reveals tiny internal architectures before burying them again.

“A Ptarmigan,” the other long central piece, deepens the animal logic. A ptarmigan is a bird of cold regions, famous for seasonal camouflage, a creature whose body changes in relation to its environment. That makes it a perfect Merzbow image. The track moves through brightness, density, grinding passages, and shifting tone, almost as if the sound itself is changing plumage. It does not progress in a conventional narrative sense, but it mutates with purpose. The listener hears not a song unfolding, but an organism adapting under pressure.

“Super Sheep” brings a different energy: shorter, faster, almost cartoonish in title, yet still full of drive and distortion. It is Merzbow’s humor showing through the machinery. That humor matters. Too often, Merzbow is treated as only severity, extremity, endurance test. But the catalog also contains absurdity, play, animal affection, pop-culture debris, and a refusal to let noise become a grim uniform. “Super Sheep” sounds like a joke that got plugged into an overpowered amplifier and developed hooves made of sparks.

“Pier 39” is another useful clue. San Francisco’s Pier 39 is famous for sea lions, and whether one hears the track as literal reference, travel memory, animal-site marker, or simply title-image, it continues the album’s creaturely pull. The record keeps suggesting that animals are not decorative subjects outside the sound. They are part of the sound’s ethics and imagination. Merzbow’s animal work often asks the listener to stop treating “nature” and “technology” as opposites. The animal is already inside the machine. The machine is already behaving like an animal.

The 2025 Urashima reissue adds another layer because remastering Merzbow is not neutral. Noise is all about density, texture, weight, frequency, and spatial violence; a remaster can change the entire bodily encounter. Lasse Marhaug’s remaster is described by Urashima as bringing new clarity, weight, and depth to the recordings, and that is exactly the kind of change that matters for this album. With Merzbow, “clarity” does not mean making the noise polite. It means letting the listener hear more of the swarm.

Inside the Private Release sequence, Animal Magnetism is especially useful because it shifts the archive from Greif’s language-fantasy into Akita’s creature-electricity. Both artists transform familiar categories until they become unstable. Greif asks what happens when a children’s story, a radio myth, or a requiem is pulled apart by sound. Merzbow asks what happens when electronics are pushed so intensely that they begin to feel organic, and when animal presence is allowed to haunt the circuitry.

The 2025 date also matters for the blog. This is not simply a post about an old 2003 CD. It is about an old recording made newly physical again through vinyl, remastering, deluxe packaging, and contemporary circulation. The album has already lived several lives: Alien8 CD, collector object, digital memory, Urashima 2LP, blog post, fresh encounter. Noise survives by changing containers. That has been one of the repeating lessons across this whole archive run.

What makes Animal Magnetism stand out from more punishing Merzbow landmarks is that it does not seem interested only in obliteration. It wants attraction. It wants movement toward the sound, not merely endurance under it. The album’s force is magnetic because it keeps offering details inside the blast: rhythmic flicker, animal trace, guitar debris, digital shard, bass-body, sudden opening, sudden crowding. It rewards the listener who stops asking for silence and starts watching the storm for behavior.

As a Private Release post, this one feels almost like a living specimen pinned without being killed. The record is historical, but still twitching. The animal is symbolic, but also real. The noise is extreme, but not lifeless. The reissue is archival, but the sound refuses museum behavior.

Animal Magnetism is Merzbow at the point where harsh noise becomes creature study. The machine does not imitate nature. It discovers that it was never separate from nature in the first place: feather, feedback, beak, guitar, claw, computer, pulse, magnet, listener. Reality enters the amplifier and comes out with wings.