*In process of stocking. 2022 stock* "Alterations on record is a bit like listening to the soundtrack to a movie without the picture show. Essential to their 'performance' was the aspect that making music can be both visually & musically entertaining; which hints at the notion of entertainment as a valid musical form - and suggests that 'High Art' can be born from "playing for laughs" - (which the Alterations perfected to such a fine art as to become 'flavour of the month' for a year or two).
At the core of Alterations music lay an attitude of irreverence. Nothing was held sacred. The profane & banal flourished amongst the sublime. Everything was given equal status. Genre & style were there to be explored and deconstructed. The cerebral ruled - but always the music was open to the element of fun - "make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh".
It was not so much the convergence of disparate concepts, styles and genres that gave Alterations music its idiosyncratic sound. But rather; the foundation of the music was a language that evolved from the game of contemplating "irreverent musical collisions". Although the collision was premeditated the resultant conjunction pushed the music into new areas - into a new vocabulary - into another language (even to the surprise of the Alterations). It is of course theses same 'irreverent collisions' of concepts that gave the music its form and dictated the overall structure and composition.
If art imitates life (and leaves an imprint). Then Alterations mimic the throwaway society. Thus on a whim or with calculated coolness Alterations discard - abandon the rarest of themes, sounds and motifs. Thence Alterations take up another theme, only for it to be displaced by the next convergence of ideas. Thus anarchy, fissures, discontinuity, the soundbite, the fragment are all pieced together by collision. Unholy alliances take place - and like the market place it is the speed & frequency with which ideas are continously usurped that shocks and unsettles - and the music remains unresolved, unfinished, open-ended (and "tradition" is overthrown without trace)." - Terry Day