Search - Nick Ryan, John Matthias, Thom Yorke :: John Matthias & Nick Ryan: Cortical Songs

Fantastic Hybrid, with Some Caveats

Fritz Gerlich | admin@audioetc.info | 09/29/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"From dub to drone to ambient to chamber, this disc encompasses a large number of styles. At the very least you will find it very interesting to listen to, and chances are good that you'll find a lot more to like about it than that. I should mention that this is not classical music with a beat a la Telarc's Time Warp. This postmodern polystylistic classical with elements of electronica, so there is dissonance & chaos as well as melody & harmony. The technological aspects of the music blend seamlessly with classical instruments. There is always a danger with this kind of hybrid that you'll end up with a chalk and cheese mix that just doesn't work. That is not the case here. Things blend together very well.



As for the caveats, as with most most non-jazz non-classical releases the mastering is sub-standard. It used to be that the mastering engineer's job was to make things sound as good as possible. Now, the sum total of their jobs seems to be to make things as loud as possible. For more info google 'loudness war' or go to wikipedia and look it up. Now I don't want to slam the mastering of this cd too hard because there is a decent amount of dynamics. However, during the forte sections there is brickwall limiting and a fair amount of clipping. There really is no double or triple fortes because they max the volume out at forte. The double and triples just end up being more distorted and more clipped, not louder. C'est la vie.



So 5 stars for the music and 2 stars for the sound quality = 3.5 overall."