If there's anything more terrifying in pop culture than the supergroup, it surely must be the concept album. Who amongst the sane cannot want to erase all vestige of Styx's Kilroy Was Here or fail to succumb to multiple thromboses when Genesis' Selling England by the Pound threatens to make its dismal reappearance on audiophile 24k gold CDs? If we learn anything from this closing millennium, it should be that 99.9% of all musicians should refrain from grandiose schemes of undiluted preposterousness and keep banging out three- minute garage band classics à la the Make Up.
Implicit in the percentage I've given above is a recognition that 0.1% of musicians should have the freedom to push artistic forms through concepts. And techno head, Stewart Walker, is amongst that number. For in Stabiles he has constructed a high art album of sparse yet funky beats and subdued ambiance that should secure maximum rotation in Manhattan art dealers' galleries for many months. Until someone like Norman Cook rips the idea off and banalizes it.
Thankfully, Walker's concept for Stabiles is simple. There's no son et lumière extravaganza depicting a world governed by malfunctioning robots, or a wry scenario about a LSD- soaked brass band led by a retired army type named after a common table condiment. No, he wished to "write sound compositions which would be a stationary focus in the home listening environment." And to this end, he turned to American sculptor Alexander Calder for inspiration. Calder is praised for his often immense metal sculptures that, though huge and metallic, have branches and arms that spin and weave within each other when the wind blows. In short, Calder sculpted paradoxical mobiles-- objects that look as though they weigh tons, but when a slight breeze blows, the mass evaporates and the sculpture becomes weightless, airy, hypnotic, and free.
It's not a bad model for a techno artist to employ, given that the genre excels in the harsh and heavy. If you're at all familiar with the releases from Berlin's Chain Reaction label, imagine those distinctive rhythms without the softened white noise and hiss that sometimes detract from the accessibility and the elegance of the imprint.
For Stabiles, Stewart Walker set up discreet loops of rhythm and let them spin on top and through each other. Occasionally, as on "Distortion Men," he'll add a tiny cricket- like sound to throw the beat out of whack. At the conclusion of "Missing Winter," Walker drops in an ambient section that would not be out of place on one of those majestic tape- loop collaborations between Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. Walker occasionally even hints at a melody and lures us in even further. "Sunclipse," fittingly the album's closing track, combines all these tricks and is as graceful as it is avant garde.
It's pretty astoundingly given the strict parameters Walker gave himself, and considering the length of the disc (just two seconds shy of an hour), that Stabiles never gets repetitive. There's always a new combination of loops to follow their meandering. If you've never seen a Calder sculpture, take it from me-- Walker's more than met his goal; he's risen to the challenge with precision, subtlety, and care. Okay, so you can't dance to it. On the other hand, Stabiles is an album every bit as beautiful as Calder's works and it costs a whole lot less to own.
