Y'know, it's funny, but there was once a time when the Alan Parsons Project was considered progressive. And why not? Sweeping art- rock orchestrals, themes as dire as alienation, surveillance and the dehumanizing effect of machinery certainly fall well within the purview of your average 1970s prog- rocker. These days, the Project's vision has been relegated to the canon of dental rock; the very sound of "Don't Answer Me" or "Eye in the Sky" makes me cringe to the impending swab of chemically- minted flouride. (As far as I know, no serious statistical correlation between the alarming rate of dentist suicides and the consistently awful quality of the piped- in office music has yet been undertaken. The work has been, nevertheless, quite cut out for the intrepid sociologist.)

Perhaps it's wise to keep Alan Parsons in mind when reviewing the latest Kranky releases; implicit here is the lesson that experimental or progressive music has a tendency to date rapidly. I know that improved dental hygiene has made dentistry an endangered practice, but let's hope that the future will rot enough teeth to keep Philosopher's Stone on the airwaves. Otherwise, our children, though cavity- free, will be worse off for not having this self- indulgent, knob- twisting masterpiece of sonic onanism. Although I'm sure that breaking any number of random pieces of electronic equipment in the home or office would be serve as a suitable surrogate.

I have a theory that this generation's so- called electronica revolution can actually be traced back not to Kraftwerk, Stockhausen or Varese but to the sound Transformers make when they transform. God, I love everything about the weird folding crunch of that sound-- so simple and yet so profound, like electric origami. But even then, I was able to realize that that sound, narcotic as it may have been, was not music. It didn't do the things music did. You couldn't dance, sleep, sing or dream to it. Former Amp character Gareth Mitchell (aka Philosopher's Stone) has apparently never learned this lesson, because the aptly- titled Apparatus is little more than a fugue of variations of that very sound.

The reference point is Experimental Audio Research, but even E.A.R. make stabs at context. Apparatus has no context at all, and consequently has very little to offer besides that fact of its own achievement: the fact that somebody in the "hermetic environment of a home studio" (that's from the press kit) could do such a thing. Some noise experiments succeed by just this type of self- justification (Sonic Youth and Jim O'Rourke's shimmering Invito a Cielo comes to mind) but Apparatus doesn't seem to offer anything particularly advanced or compelling. Sounds like something Eno would bang out all fucked up at a party after being prompted by the revelers for some drinking music. And according to Kranky, this piece took Mitchell almost a year to complete.

Discussing individual tracks seems somewhat fruitless-- one listen (and this is being written on my fifth listen) exposes the track separations as mere convention. Some of the sounds and patterns grow momentarily compelling, even quite beautiful, before they're unceremoniously dismantled. I am reminded of the alien seas on Solaris in the Lem novel of that name: one can stare at them for hours but the end result is madness. Apparatus poses no threat to your mental health but will surely grate on your musical sensibilities: how can something so meticulously crafted sound so soulless and hollow? Industrial crunch, digital farts and squeaks, electric pins and needles, and reverberating tides of synthesizer all abound, but the end result is avant- garde muzak. So again we find ourselves back in the dentist's chair, perhaps a generation in the future, listening to Apparatus drone from the speakers. And somehow, we can't tell the music from the drill.

-Brent S. Sirota