Search - K. Leimer and Savant :: The Neo-Realist (at Risk)

An example of "remote collaboration", Savant was assembled by Kerry Leimer to explore the possibilities of heavily manipulated music in a more familiar rock context. Collaborators were rarely allowed to hear more than a single part of any piece, responding to verbal instruction and click tracks. Their contributions were then edited, reprocessed, rearranged, treated and sometimes looped to create the illusion of standard song forms. The results are often compared to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (thanks to the use of found voices, a technique used by Leimer one year earlier for the Land of Look Behind score). Digitally remastered release of the 1983 vinyl. "Sure, the average record buyer may be a racist and sexist male dodo between 18 and 26, but as Gershwin said, 'It ain't necessarily so.' In trying to whet your appetite to sample The Neo Realist (at Risk), an album by an outfit out of Seattle known as Savant, perhaps I should say that the road out dives into the Bush of Ghosts. Kerry Leimer and company have produced a body of work that starts from the David Byrne/Brian Eno collaboration as a point of familiarity and steams off in its own direction. The method of construction of each piece is always in plain view, like the exoskeleton of an insect - lots of looped and treated guitars, and synthetics hung on a simple rhythmic structure. One has the sense of the way dub music in reggae is constructed while listening to the work, but Savant's tonal and timbral vocabulary is very different from dub. Most of the sounds inhabit that unusual territory between nature and the new soundscapes of the industrial environment, and is in fact the result of some very sophisticated technologies applied to the production of a sort of polyglot 'invented' ethnic music. ('Most of the percussion is wood and bamboo, but was the last sound a bird or a squeaky wheel in the machine of fate????') Also, like dub stylings, the human voice is given roughly the same status as the other instruments. It appears forward, backward, sped up, slowed down, and in a variety of permutations, whizzing in and out of the mix. The major exceptions to this are the title track, which features a properly disjointed vocal by John Foster on visiting a rescue mission (a sort of David Byrne and Ric Ocasek go to the mission), and the insertion of an African news script read by Akebulon Wake. At every step of the way, there is clearly a strong attention to detail here, which at first listen may not be obvious. My only problem (and a minor one, at that) is that the liner notes indulge in a kind of description of instrument and process that serves to mystify the proceedings rather than to tell you what's being done and allowing you to examine the way it's used. That provides a kind of misdirection of attention, towards the illusion (how did he do that?) and not towards the experience of hearing! . Savant is interested in examining ideas of what is foreground and what constitutes background in our listening experience, and the casual listener can, I think, be forgiven for imagining he hears only background. This record takes an investment of time and attention to reveal its charms, and it is time well spent off the beaten path." ? Gregory Taylor, RTQE