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[CP 105 CD] Tom Cameron; Music To Wash Dishes By +

Creel Pone

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2016 edition, complete with an extended bonus track: the entirety of Cameron's performance at the New Music America 1982 festival on Chicago's Navy pier, about which none other than Carl Stone wrote, "His presence was inappropriate, his performance in bad taste." (yikes; I wonder how Carl would feel about this now?) This live-set sounds like a million bucks & is quite far away from the cod-Berlin school approach that perhaps Stone was railing against.

Nice to see this 1982 “Private Press” LP by Chicagoland’s Tom Cameron in the program; I’ve long felt this was one of the better “One Man Against the World ... with Synthesizer” LPs self-financed during the late-70s / early-80s.


Each side features an extended, gorgeous take on analogue “Automation” book-ended by two, shorter, more “Accessible” numbers. The A-side’s “Another Question” is an impeccably gaseous, floating void of minimal diminished-minor filigree that rates up there with the best of J.D. Emanuel & Steve Birchall’s variegated work while avoiding straight “Ambient Float” tactics. The B-side’s title-track works a heavy array of bubbling minor arpeggiations, killer tape-echo’ed rhythm-box flair with tons of metrically modulating lines & neat poly-rhythmic programming & Terminator-style malaise culminating in a cascading bubble-wave.

On top of the excellent, regional, private-universe zeal of the music, this has both one of my favorite album covers of all time - a portrait set on Raicevic-ian landscape-voids drawn by mr. Cameron himself - as well as back-cover, a “Money Shot” featuring mr. Cameron lounging in Oak Park amidst a full Shure Vocal Master P.A.. & a series of EML Electrocomp systems, all set in motion, transcribing his brain-wave activity ala Alvin Lucier & converting it to sound.