MEGA WAVE ORCHESTRA - Mega Wave Orchestra (Libreville) The music on this compilation was, for the most part, originally released privately in Geneva as a box set containing five LPs by The Mega Wave Orchestra and five prints by the artist Richard Reimann. The Mega Wave Orchestra, the brain-child of musician, mathematician, and composer Christian Oestreicher, was conceived as a multi-media electronic music orchestra.
It was comprised of seven keyboard players Christine Schaller, Vincent Barras, Jacques Demierre, Olivier Rogg, Rainer Boesch, Roger Baudet, and Benoit Corboz, with Oestreicher as arranger and producer.
The Mega Wave Orchestra created a piece of new hybrid music. It was music with roots in the jazz and classical traditions, but one which also drew on the sonic freedom of musique concrete and the kind of total experience offered by psychedelia. The diverse backgrounds and specialisms of each of the band leaders/writers resulted in a wide variety of music across the five discs: from austere drones and granular aural detail to warm oddball fusion and gorgeous but cracked vocal jazz.
There are useful contemporary comparisons to be made: zoned synth jazz like the Azimuth LP on ECM or Karin Krog’s Freestyle; Larry Heard’s sequencer Dreamtime; the Valium minimalism of Pep Llopis or Jun Fukamaki; Dexter Wansel’s shimmering arrangements for Loose Ends, or even the FM sheen meets cold war threat of Donald Fagen’s Night Fly. Here, too, is the sound of music technology about to snowball and define its own aesthetic, unknowingly prefiguring auteurish bedroom producers like Black Dog or The Detroit Escalator Company. Recommended!
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