When Vital Weekly was called Vital, and printed on paper (1986-1995) the name Eric Lunde appeared with some regular intervals, simply because he was quite active releasing records and tapes. His performance like approach to noise music, his elaborate packaging which always raised more questions than it would give answers made a big impact. And then he seemed gone and now he has returned. I have no idea what he did in the years in between. His music doesn't seem to have changed very much (I am still thinking wether that's good or bad) and its still his trademark sound we find here: eroded sound. Lunde uses cassettes, memo recorders and cheap microhones to tape sounds and mix these. Played back into a space - re-record, played back, re-record until quite a crude sound appears. That's what he does here in his three tracks, including a 'live site recording of two air 'separtion' tanks'. Crude, very crude ambient music. Lunde takes the ideas of Alvin Lucier's 'I'm Sitting In A Room' to the extreme, with very low grade equipment and builds from the dirty sounds beautiful music. Time to dig out the old stuff and play that again.
On the other side we find Kommissar Hjuler, without Mama Baer this time. I tried to translate the liner notes from German in Dutch, but I failed. It has something to do with scooter? We hear some sort of (toy?) car sound, lots of rumble and a voice. Much alike last week's tape of Hjuler, this seems to be another example of highly personal audio poetry. Twenty minutes of this. It certainly has a great charm indeed, but its significance somehow eludes me here. Truely outsider music, that's for sure."
[FdW / Vital Weekly]