Martin Bland - Randomized Control Trials

Genre rock Publisher Self-released

Martin Bland has led a hardcore rock-and-roll lifestyle, first as the drummer of Australian miscreants Lubricated Goat and lately with Mudhoney spinoff outfit The Monkeywrench. But it is this CD which fully illustrates Bland's penchant for controlled chaos. The premise is as follows: musicians recording separately from one another follow a common, loose theme but a strict tempo. Then Bland edited each piece and assigned each instrument a CD player. Then, by playing the tracks simultaneously whilst using the shuffle function, Bland created a new piece with each listen, kind of like The Flaming Lips' four-disc set Zaireeka. However, unlike, say, Brian Eno and David Byrne's collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, all of the music/effects/voices, found or otherwise, sprung organically from the recording sessions and were not sampled.

The results are as diverse and as fascinating as you might expect. The separation of the participants from the source of the music and from one another gives the album a haunting, disjointed feel despite the musicians' adherence to the tempo/theme strictures. Yet there is a strange telepathy on "Lurk the Blue Crawfish," for instance, where an expanse of negative space remains untouched by nearly all of the musicians involved, which is unexpected, restrained and quite nice. "The Great Temptations of Beyond" features a stately muted trumpet/organ combo with buried spoken-word vocals, which give the album its necessary cohesive element.

Randomized Control Trials is challenging without being obnoxious, which goes a long way. Also, it's eminently listenable. Best part: each CD is individually lathe-cut from actual metal (I'm not sure which kind, but it's sharp).

Martin Bland has self-released Randomized Control Trials, but, because he does not have a website, to order copies of the album you must e-mail him at: Mrbiand@yahoo.com