Review for people who were born deaf and recently gained the ability to hear (by recently, we mean within the last hour): Buy this CD. Get someone to take you to Coconuts and ask the cashier about Non. In sign language, if necessary.
Review for people who can and have been able to hear: We live in a city. A big city. Not an especially nice part of a big city. For us, muggings, police sirens, and the stench of raw sewage is part of the scenery. As we walk to and from class, the homeless accost us, cars run stop signs and narrowly avoid taking us out, and students with bullhorns complain about the administration. To put it mildly, we're bombarded with the bustling noise and activity of a city on a daily basis (the emphasis being on "noise"). It's never really quiet here. But we've grown accustomed to it and it's not much of an issue.
But we understand that not everyone has the privilege of living in such a cacophonous environment. Fortunately, Non (aka Boyd Rice) had these people in mind when he recorded Receive the Flame. For those of you from the dust bowl states who feel that you've been missing out on an entire world of noise, this album puts you right in the thick of it. We can imagine how much someone-- say Marlee Matlin-- would enjoy Non, if her hearing was to be miraculously restored by faith-healers or voodoo shamans. If you lived in a world of deafening silence, 35 minutes of random screeching, helicopter sounds, and the rare suppressed organ or violin would be a welcome change. Not so for the rest of us. And even if you did like it, that's no reason to buy Receive the Flame. You could get a more-than-decent facsimile of the Non experience by sitting on a airport runway with a boombox blaring classical music with the bass turned off.
Receive the Flame is experimental music, and any music fan can appreciate the spirit in which it was created. But, hey, guess what? The experiment failed! It might have seemed like a good idea to create an unnecessarily dense collage of sound, but we can't imagine the end result spending much time in anyone's stereo. There have been many others before Boyd Rice who've made incoherent noise with much more inventiveness and pizzazz, and surely many more will follow. But in the unlikely event that we ever do get the yen for Non again, we'll just put a Dictaphone cassette of whale songs inside a refrigerator and pack our ears with cigarette butts.
