Samm Bennett, best known as a mainstay of the 1980s New York avant garde music scene, has a new album out, Roomful Of Ghosts. Cultural critic Mark Dery digs it big time. I haven't heard the album but Mark's review is fantastic in its own right. From Shovelware:
Call it slumdog gagaku. Or gutbucket p'ansori. Or a black cat moan wrapped around a lonesome train whistle, cured in Tokyo fog and nailed to some grotesque African fetish, deep in the swamp dark. If that's too clever by half, let me just say that I love the unvarnished honesty of this stuff; the pensive moodiness of "I Burned This Song"; the heart-stoppingly beautiful stillness-in-the-middle-of-a-fast-moving-boxcar vibe of "Until You Kiss Me"; the loping, hypnotic gait of "A Thousand Rhymes."
And the lyrics! They're uncut brilliance, reminiscent of the electroconvulsive blues of Captain Beefheart or Rauschenberg's droll "combines," Pop art mash-ups like "Monogram" (you know, the stuffed Angora goat with the tire around its middle).
