INVENTIONS FOR ELECTRIC GUITAR

A very ambitious title for such an ordinary album, Gottsching might seem to be thinking a little too much of his music by this time. Because there is nothing on this album that there wasn't already on his previous records, for that matter, there appears to be a lot less twists and turns than before. Indeed there aren't even much guitars on the album, but it's full of sequencers that seemed borrowed from Tangerine Dream. For that matter ART's IFEG is probably the closest to a (good) TD album than to anything he'd done before. The 22-mins Pluralis shows that Gottsching found something similar to frippetronics or loops and this will be explored for the duration of track, for better or for worse.

Gliding, smooth, slowly-evolving minimalist music that has at least an hypnotic quality (but again nothing that TD hadn't mastered better either) that brings you smoothly to the borders of boredom or the frontiers of awakening, but in no case will you find excitement or power in such a flat (dare I say dull??) album.