That isn’t the full album title; it’s just a fraction of its long and illustrious title. But if I were to list it in full, I would reach my word count target quickly, and I will need all the words I can fit into the full description of what is happening here. Believe me.
The album reminds me of a fantastic thought and music experiment I read about. A musician tied a piece of string to a violin and dragged it down a gravel path, and asked us to consider the music being generated. It was a regular instrument being wielded by a trained musician, so his argument went, how is it different from a Bach concerto or a lilting Debussy piano piece?
And A Sonic Grab Box…begs the same sort of questions. This is, after all, a recognisable set of sounds, just put together in new, interesting, satirical and sometimes downright odd ways. It ranges from free-form jazz noodles to orchestral parodies, from recognisably conformist short bursts to sections which seem like an anagram of music itself. If you turn such creativity on its head, could it be termed decomposing? Or merely a spot of avant gardening.
You can tell from the titles that Gary Lloyd Noland likes wordplay…I have no idea what words such as Shenantics or Stupocalyptic mean, but I do like the sound of them. But the fun he has inventing compound words and imagined prose entirely matches the music he makes. In many ways, it is a new musical language, a strange one understood and appreciated only by a few, but a new language nonetheless.
Trying to capture an overall sonic style and put it into mere words is difficult; the music is too restless and adventurous for that, like trying to pin a musical tail on a sonic rabbit, a rabbit travelling at mach one…through different dimensions…oh, and it’s invisible. And keeps changing shape. One common factor is the ebb and flow of the piano, wandering as it does between calm and collected lulls and spiky crescendoes, sometimes floaty and ambient, just as often nervous and jittery. And on top of this, all manner of electronic quirks and quibbles seem to gyre and gimble, (see, he’s got me reaching for nonsense words now) dance and explode like a mad firework display.
I guess all music can, and indeed should, make us think. Some does so unintentionally, some through the use of poignant lyrics, some by making serious and deliberate musical statements. A Sonic Grab Box goes even further. It makes us question the very nature of music, what it is and what it might be. It tests boundaries and even beliefs; it is brave and mad and full of humour and bravado. It might seem to some that the music found here is frivolous, that Noland doesn’t care and is just having fun with us. Yes, he is having fun, but I would say that only someone who truly cares about music could make something this interesting and exploratory.
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