And how, you may well ask, do the epochal Beck and the magisterial Glass bond and re-bond? With lots of echo, I’m here to report. Echo and backwards-boinging. And the chanting of an avant-garde choir. Because “avant-garde” is “now,” for now, this choir sings high-low, high-low for a while; a male voice arises chanting about “people in the street,” then sinks back into the mix. On the whole, the remix is slippery, round-sounded, making the few mildly jagged edges all the more abrasive. I have no idea how it will sound five years or even five weeks from now, but I love the assemblage, the garlands of guitar, and the ever-popular fake-vinyl-winding-down bit—which winds back up, even!
And that’s an important distinction, because Glass and his marching-on prefigured nothing so much as post-digital, post-disc, and streaming—indeed! The album co-curated by Beck—who gets the longest single-track running time over the double-disc set—features a mix of artists including electronic musician Amon Tobin and composer Tyondai Braxton. Disco beats thump, distortion buckles, video-game noises tink; you could take some of this to a rave and it wouldn’t stand out, although oddly enough the ’70s-organ sounds sticking out of the grander picture set me smiling. If we don’t ever escape our basics, after all, we won’t have to worry about getting back to them.
