or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

CLAAAAANNNGggggg!!! And this is how Musica Electronica Viva’s (MEV) Spacecraft begins. A loud and ear piercing sound (even at low volume). This might have been a-musical (especially considering that Frederic Rzewski came from the classical world) but a beginning it is. But in improvisation, and as this performance shows, it’s not the beginning or how it ends that matters. ‘It’ must begin and ‘it’ must end, whether it’s a song or any avant-shenanigans but for the audience and the listener the question is: can we get a ‘kick’ out of this? Or are the shapes satisfying? Or, as the blurb on the CD sleeve seems to be saying: can those improvised moments (‘atoms’) collide to make er-music (‘molecules’). “As if a giant molecule were taking form out of nothing”-but wait a bloody second here! Doesn’t the first law of thermodynamics say that energy is neither created nor destroyed.

At least Rzewski’s notes don’t make a case for ‘art’ or act as a bloody grant plead from some arts funding council. It’s about energy and magic, about the destruction of the performer and it mentions that the audience may be disappointed (we risk failure therefore it’s worth it) about not pressing the ‘cage’ and ‘stockhausen’ key (though it might press the not mentioned ‘AMM key’ for this 1967 performance, which comes at least a few months after the release of AMMusic 1966).

The air is filled by Allen Bryant’s homemade synthesizer, Alvin’s Curran’s electric percussion/trumpet/voice, Rzewski’s piano being replaced by amplified glass and springs (to make ‘new molecules’ you need new reactions and elements/catalysts), Richard Teitelbaum is on moog and Ivan Vandor is on alto sax, this being the only nod to convention as far as instrumentation goes.

Six minutes gone and this saxophone enters the picture- but his playing has plenty of squealing from the gut, his playing being much more of a ‘mess’ than, say, a lot of free jazz coming out of America at that time. It doesn’t so much join as crashes in and this seems to be perfectly ‘in tune’ with the rest of the proceedings. There are many disruptions, which make damn sure that a constant ‘groove’ is never apparent. One of these disruptions is silence itself.

There are, throughout this (40 minutes long) piece, stretches of quiet, but it’s something that is never seems stable, something that never threatens to go into new age territory. The cliché of ‘knowing what not to play’ kicks in but it’s a cliché I’m happy to use here. You could almost be forgiven for thinking that post-rock might have borrowed some of the curves being generated out of things like this, in how starts at the lower end and then, it builds again, and once momentum is built, it suddenly screams out at you (like your local nu-metal band) but these ‘acts’ (hello Mogwai) seem not to know where they are going, almost as if scared of making a mess of things so a plan is always followed, whereas here there is no fear of making a mess and that’s a quality to be admired.

And when you factor some of the harsh sounds being churned (the mega-phoned ‘vocal’, the only reminder that people are making this music, but its all so distorted) out you can argue that some sort proto-industrial improv manifesto is being drawn up (well, haven’t you seen any AMM records in the ambient or industrial sections of your local second hand store?).

As I type this I’m listening to “Unfied Patchwork Theory”, the other track on this CD (from 1990, Rzewski is on piano, Steve Lacy is on sax and a sampler is listed). I think this sounds a bit more work safe-um, yes. I think it does.*

*This might a joke.