On the Road Again
Live Reviews:

EAR (Experimental Audio Research)
December 5, 1998
Lee's Palace, Toronto, ON

From the scintillating show Sonic Boom a.k.a. Pete Kemper put on as EAR in "Toronto' Finest Rock Venue" recently, one would never guess that he started his musical life as vocalist/bassist for the saturatedly psychedelic UK rock band Spacemen 3. Yet his work in Spectrum, in which he played feedback while maintaining the pretence of song structure, is now clearly visible as merely preparation for his new work: making organized sound with rewired Speak'n'Spell machines.

Mr. Boom's equipment for the evening consisted of six such implements, a Boss SP-202, and a mixer. He operated these devices smoking pot with headphones on, his bent back to the audience, leaving the spastic in charge of the coloured stage lights to command the visual environment. The set unfolded as one long piece, with around ten sections differentiated through subtle changes in timbre, rhythm and volume. Although the sounds remained churning and trebly throughout, there was a diversity of textures that belied the economy of instrumentation.

At times, the sound resembled a psychotic video arcade; at others, with the use of pan, filter, flange and delay algorithms, noise approximating both a vintage sci-fi soundtrack and submarine sonar were produced. Overall it was a nice noise, simultaneously more and less complex than Lou Reed's epic Metal Machine Music: there was much more obviously going on, but the immediate sense of Chaos Theory in action the latter album produces was not present here.

The above description was obtuse and scientific;Sonic Boom's new music demands no less. Cerebral, it owes a great debt to the classical avant-garde of forty years ago, with the only twist being the rock volume and venue. Indeed, EAR has little to do with rock'n'roll, which started as a blues euphemism for sex. Maybe the growing popularity of music like EAR's marks a millennial shift of cultural interest from the body to the mind, if not the soul. I hope not. What used to be great about rock was its ability to make me hear a being's blood. After the polite applause for EAR died away, I left without feeling this experience, or anything.