SORTIE

For better or worse, the Sortie CD is the most easily accessible way to get a legitimate copy of the work of Cartoon, America's answer to Henry Cow or Samla Mammas Manna. For the most part, it's better, since you get almost - but not quite - the entirety of their two studio albums on one CD. The sole missing track is Trio from Music From Left Field - a lightweight bit of nothing which may well have been devised solely to round off side one of that album, which was otherwise mostly taken up with the 15 minute epic Quotes. The odds of an American band playing this sort of music having any sort of commercial success in the early 1980s was always going to be remote, but Cartoon's body of work is impressive enough to merit a critical rediscovery, and Sortie is the best presentation it had. It's also 30 years old - isn't it high time Cuneiform revisited this stuff?