For someone with absolutely nothing (beyond a shared name) to do with the psychologically disturbed founder of Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green has worked with an impressive list of people. At the top of that list is Prince Charles. Whether you're a lifetime subscriber to Royalty magazine or pledge allegiance to the treasonous opinion that the House of Windsor are aristo dole-scroungers who are nothing more than Hanoverian pretenders to the throne, you'll have to give props to Green. The current heir to the British monarchy's top job, Prince Charles, commissioned Green to write intense electro-acoustic compositions for HRH's "Party in the Park" fundraiser. Green's also performed before the Duke of Kent. The fucking Duchess of Wessex probably has a ringtone generated by Green.

Rock's royalty has acknowledged Green, too. In 2000, Mick Jagger commissioned Green to write "MV," a piece for the opening of Mick's Centre for the Performing Arts. "MV" combines orchestral elements with pop and electro-acoustical composition, and was accompanied by a computer graphics video for completion's sake.

So why the connection with the home of Braindance, Rephlex? Rather than via a tawdry handshake or two at a royal garden party. Green established his connection to Rephlex via his collaborations with the far less regally linked Kosmik Kommando (aka Mike Dred). Before 1998's Rephlex-released Virtual Farmer album, Green had recorded for Dred's own Machine Codes label, joining Dred's own love of harsh experimentalism with utterly mental aciiieeed. Virtual Farmer showcased a less fucked sound and a more self-consciously art house approach to composition. Kosmik Kommando later seemed to have recanted with the phreaked-out electro of Laptop Dancing. But you can definitely hear the deliberated work of Virtual Farmer in the rollicking drops that foment the funk of Laptop Dancing.

Macbeth: An Original Score accompanied the Westminster Theatre's production of Shakespeare's Macbeth. This seven-track EP that includes incidental music to the 1999 West End production of The Scottish Play is not the ideal starting point for a course in Green appreciation. Indeed, for a man who composed a dance piece entitled Wank Stallions, Macbeth is a thoroughly dour exercise. But what else can we expect? It's incidental music to one of the most visceral tragedies of all time. It's hardly going to rival the levity of soundtrack to Legally Blonde.

Macbeth, the play, has inspired many an artist. For instance, fifty years after the painter Henry Fuseli saw David Garrick's performance, it continued to haunt him, and provoked in him one of his finest Gothic nightmares, a phantasmagoric depiction of Lady Macbeth seizing the bloody knives from her terrified and confused husband as well as the demonic fantasia, "Macbeth, Banquo and the Witches on the Heath."

Unfortunately, Peter Green's appreciation of Macbeth in no way rivals Fuseli's. Because I did see the Westminister Theatre Company's production, reviewing the soundtrack has proved difficult for me. Not knowing how the director used the muted but stock ambience of "Shipmeadow" in the performance makes it hard for me to judge the piece, as it's encoded on the CD. What comes out lackluster from my stereo may well have been gripping in combination with the actors' performances. This review is therefore based on the precept that I am judging Macbeth as a standalone album.

After "Shipmeadow" comes Green's take on a medieval dance, which he candidly admits on the Rephlex website might sound too much like a Monty Python parody of a dance tune of the Middle Ages. The synthetic approximations of sackbuts and serpents, etc., do sound highly comic. The Medieval doom ensembles the Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud and Dead Can Dance have successfully negotiated the perils of realizing modern versions of ancient musical forms without lapsing into comedy. Green's version of the dance suffers because it sounds like it's been generated with equipment that anyone could buy at Circuit City.

Modern Medievalists like Dead Can Dance get round the oafish Renaissance Fair trap by using period or reproduction instruments and doing some scholarly research. The rich tones of the sackbut just can't be preset. Yet, beyond the ersatz sound of the piece, "Medieval Dance" sounds precisely as you would think such a dance would sound. Rather than emulate or reference the complex dissonances and interplays of, say, William Lawes' admittedly Renaissance-era Consortt Setts, Green, I believe, has relied too heavily on secondary or tertiary popular culture sources. His anxiety about the piece being too reminiscent of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is well-founded.

Green fairs far better when exploring electro-acoustical timbres and modes. "The Sinister Plot," which Green hopes conveys "the unscrupulous activities that ultimately lead to death," does exactly that. The foreboding evil that will forever corrupt the lives of the characters in the play is unsettlingly palpable. The spectral "Witches" is equally successful at sonically depicting the metamorphosis of rocks into the three witches of the play.

The remaining three tracks of this EP, I believe, did not accompany the Macbeth performance. "GT=Tape," "Grrearra Falcon," and "Cap-hacked" all appear to be related to Green's Master's degree thesis project. "GT=Tape" investigates the electro-acoustics of an electric guitar and their transformations. The piece builds slowly in timbre only to fade out with a "that's all folks!" "Grrearra Falcon" possesses far greater movement and swagger, no doubt as a result of Green's emphasis on uncovering shards of melody and harmonic interaction. Closing with "Cap-Hacked," Green shows that he's as resourceful a composer as the Matmos duo. With just porcelain cups as his source, Green produces coursing sounds more suited to a Bomb Squad production.

Whichever way you approach this EP, you encounter obstacles. I find that five out of the seven tracks here are challenging and fascinating in their appreciation and use of objects and sounds. But royalty excepted, most people don't want to be bothered with academic electro-acoustic exercises. Matmos have negotiated this reluctance by throwing in a house groove once in a while. While such popular strategies may not have won many purists' plaudits, they have introduced electro-acoustical environments to those who prefer a Fatboy Slim album. I hope that Green's next full-length addresses an audience who are not so interested in his Master's thesis, because as his collaborations with Mike Dred unequivocally prove Green could easily become an ambassador for an immensely unpopular and misunderstood genre.

-Paul Cooper