In the liner notes, Robin Storey – aka Rapoon – recounts being invited to record an ‘unplugged’ album, and how the project that would become ‘Cultural Forgeries’ was recorded on a portastudio and then tweaked around and...
Many of the tracks are effectively a solo piece by a single instrument. Others overlay just two or three. And given the list of instruments, it seems Storey was game for having a crack on anything he could get his hands on.
Crazy trumpets, tribal drums, banjo, ukulele… snake-charmer’s pipe (that would be the Indian flute, I suppose...) something that sounds like a chorus of kazoos… all kinds of weird, wonderful and obscure instruments from around the globe... some of the tracks are mellow, almost ambient, others drone and hum, others sound a little off-key, as though the techniques for playing the instruments haven’t been fully mastered.
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The stippling vibrations and cavernous reverb turn innocent and friendly instruments into growling cave-dwelling beasts and create some unsettling effects.
The result is a rather odd album and certainly not an ‘acoustic’ album in the popular sense. And needless to say, it’s all the better for that.
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