The Terminal Symphony

VINYL FORMAT. Includes a 40-minute bonus CD, The Hilton, featuring previously-unreleased material. Since Porcelain Opera, U.S. noisenik Jeff Witscher aka Rene Hell has put out a whole series of collaborations, 7"s, tapes and splits. Looking to his love of classical minimalism, Jeff took it as the starting point for this new record. The result is a deeply electronic rendition of a classical electronic formula; the digital and analog synthesizer and drum machine sounds that brought Porcelain Opera to life are reframed and transferred into a very different compositional structure. The Terminal Symphony is Jeff's attempt to write tighter, more composed pieces of music -- something of a reaction against the glut of long, often-flabby drone compositions that have become a mainstay in the scene. The pieces here are short, concise, and packed full of ideas that can take multiple listens to unravel and the album as a whole is almost obsessively structured and complex. Each side of the record is composed very specifically with a beginning, middle and an end, and when we begin with the familiar grunt and grind of "Chamber Forte," it is only mere minutes before the track dissolves into the main theme of the album. The dancing synthetic blips that pirouette across Witscher's mournful electronic waves not only re-enforce the decades-long love affair between electronic and classical music, but help to define it in 2011.