R Millis — 120

Robert Millis is member of Climax Golden Twins, collector of 78rpm records and maker of fieldrecordings. What's considered his first solo-album Leaf Music, Drunks, Distant Drums was a collection of the latter, made in South-East Asia.

These also are the three main ingredients of what comprises his second solo-cd. 120 opens with bits and pieces of 78rpm records from distant times that melt together with recordings from distant places (for most of the readers of this musiczine anyway). It's all woven together in a beautiful musical roadtrip with organic drones and imaginative soundscapes. I'm not very familiar with Climax Golden Twins but I think the more ambient and cinematic parts are coming from that place, or at least the Session 9 soundtrack they did. Musical disciplines seemingly far apart sometimes find eachother on common grounds, like the 'insect electronica' and calmly bowed ambience in 2 (All Balled Up). 0 (Suspended) is more pastoral in nature, where dreamy strings swarm through an ominous glass organ drone, with a result that I'd like to describe roughly as Niblock meets Pärt. Thus the four movements go through various moods, flowing naturally into eachother until the lonely countryblues of (Charcoal Twins).

Recorded sounds are usually used to confirm whether a memory is true or not, to separate fact from fiction. On 120 they serve primarily to make up a fantasy world. A memory of something that doesn't necessarily exist. This originally was released as a very limited run of cdr's, Etude now released it as a 'real' cd (limited to 1,000 copies), so here's your second chance to grab this wonderful artifact.