I am on the reviewers' list for ReR Megacorp Records, a British-based label that specializes in music so obscure, weird, eclectic, or just plain unlistenable that no one else will publish it. They send me CD's. Every couple of months I get some more offerings from ReR. They have never forgotten that I wrote reviews of some of their releases back in the old days about ten years ago. I just got two new CD's yesterday.

ReR was founded by the British rock and avant-garde drummer Chris Cutler to showcase recordings which he personally wanted the world to hear. The extensive ReR catalog naturally features loads of music which he and his many collaborators have played over the years. Cutler has been putting out experimental music now for more than thirty years, so he's got a big backlog.

I dutifully listen to just about all the CD's ReR sends me, but despite my tolerance for unusual and even weird music, most of the ReR material just isn't to my taste. I'm not sure just whose taste it is for; the intended audience seems like even more of a sliver population than those who prefer my own favorite electronic space and rhythmic ambient. Much of the ReR music is re-releases of older work, the result of crossing the atonal, chaotic musical trends of the late twentieth century with rock bands and instrumentation. You get screechy sopranos or spasmodic male vocalists doing a sort of twelve-tone nonmelodic line over a noisy background of fuzzing electric guitars. There are a lot of soundtracks to old performance art pieces from "back in the eighties" when this was hot stuff, what they used to call "transgressive" before it was co-opted by pop culture. There are a number of "arty" European or even Anglo-American bands who play rock using "classical" instruments like oboes, cellos, or bassoon. All this music has its moments but in general, in my opinion, it has not aged well. The music world is still waiting for something with a fresh, attractive new tonal profile, and probably will wait a long time.

There are some ReR discs, though, which I find captivating. These are the "world" or "environmental" recordings. These are more like sound-collages where an artist or composer allows some indigenous, or traditional, or folk music to show forth while he makes minimal changes to it. I have heard medieval or even ancient-sounding music from Hungary or Macedonia on ReR, as well as Italian folk music which makes familiar Italy sound disturbingly alien. And then there are the recordings where the makers take equipment into the field, picking up sounds from places I will never visit. One recording (BAIKAL ICE by Peter Cusack, 2004) features the sounds of the ice of Lake Baikal in Siberia along with some of the sounds from the people and animals who live around it. Another, POND by Tod Dockstader and David Lee Myers, gives us a creepy and sometimes funny mix of real amphibian and insect noises along with electronic manipulations. Albums like these are the reason why I don't mind finding the next installment of ReR review copies at my door. You never know what might emerge from Cutler's cabinet.

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