Label: Unseen Worlds - UW10

ローゼンブーム関連作の中でもかなり異色の一枚。アルヴィン・ルシエ、ロバート・アシュリー等、大御所勢の作品にも関わってきた女性シンガーJacqueline Humbertと制作した82年自主制作盤。アヴァンギャルド、アカデミックな電子音楽とは違い、昼間のテレビドラマをイメージしたというカジュアルな電子ポップス。こういった一面もかなり興味深くて面白い。



Daytime Viewing (1979-80) is an extended narrative song, based on a casual analysis of daytime television drama and the audience phenomena such programming addresses. The piece explores the use of fantasy as a survival mechanism against loneliness, illustrating the human compulsion to inflate the mundane to mythological proportions. A central female character weaves tales, using threads of personal experience and the idea of TV as friend, as mantra, and as transformational window between imagined spectacle and the pedestrian plane.

Originally released as a private cassette edition [recorded, 1982; Chez Hum-Boom release, 1983] documenting the collaborative performance piece of the same name by Jacqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom, this heady, thoroughly enjoyable work is available for the first time ever on CD and LP. Jacqueline Humbert (aka J. Jasmine) is a songwriter of brains and wit on par with Robert Ashley, with whom she's worked extensively. David Rosenboom's complex, harmonic electronic arrangements are accentuated brilliantly by percussion from William Winant. Daytime Viewing can happily be added to a small but significant group of work that, through lesser-known paths, engaged in an equally revelatory reexamination of the Great American Songbook as Minimalism did with 20th Century composition. Mastered by David Rosenboom.