Carl Stone, “Baroo” (Unseen Worlds)
The arrival of a Carl Stone album is always cause for excitement, and Baroo (out today on the excellent avant-garde-music incubator Unseen Worlds) is no exception. After two fantastic archival releases on UW—Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties and Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties—it’s great to hear some newer Stone works. Baroo proves that the American composer is still capable of creating supremely disorienting and beautiful collages that elicit dream-like, euphoric states. “I have always been searching for a way to articulate the intangible area between the recognizable and the unfathomable,” Stone says on Unseen Worlds’ Bandcamp, “a feeling perhaps informed by some long-abandoned experiments with psychedelics.” Deep gratitude and respect, sir.
As he’s proved dozens of times over the decades, Stone is a master of voice manipulation, shredding singers’ phonemes into mesmerizing and discombobulating mosaics of otherworldly intrigue. Sometimes his pieces sound like a pop artist’s CD glitching out spectacularly, a manufacturer’s defect alchemized into sonic art of the highest (dis)order. By contrast, “Baroo” comes off like gut-bucket Latin funk run through a fun-house sampler; it’s an amphetamine-DMT cocktail of potent equilibrium subversion. While the track’s probably too hyper-surreal to work on a dance floor, its über-jittery rhythm, babbling vocals, and festive horns will surely get you moving—perhaps more spasmodically than you’ve ever moved before. File next to Señor Coconut for electronic-music hijinks that suggest an impossibly exuberant future.
