|
||||
Dome of Discovery
Review in PTOLEMEIC TERRASCOPE, No. 16, June 1994
CHRIS JUDGE SMITH - DOME OF DISCOVERY
One of the things about Van der Graaf Generator which most appealed to their devotees was that in amongst all the doom and gloom there lurked an absurd and manic sense of humour. The release of ‘Dome of Discovery’ confirms a suspicion that the source for much of that spirit was Chris Judge Smith.
Although he left the band in 1968 (after only one single had been released:
‘Firebrand’ / ‘The People You Were Going To’, hastily withdrawn when it was discovered that it had come out on the wrong label!) he has continued to write songs both with and for Peter Hammill, including writing all the lyrics for Hammill’s recent opera ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. ‘Dome of Discovery’ is Judge Smith’s first album proper, leaving aside his earlier collection of demos released by Oedipus Recs - at least one of which, ‘There’s No Time Like The Present’, sounds like pure early Van der Graaf generator to these ears. This time, Judge Smith has chosen to take a very different approach to the recording of his music, using what appears to be a mythical band of assorted musicians who have been configured very convincingly from computer samples. The songs are fairly poppy, often almost absurdly cheerful-starting, for example, with ‘Tell Me You Love Me’ which is driven along by a punky cello riff doubled almost immediately by a Tijuana-style trumpet and a great rimshot drummer. The song outlines that typical sense of insecurity; tell me you love me, and then say it again in French, now in a Welsh accent, and soon through Swedish, Norwegian, Greek, Tibetan, Xhosa, Morse Code, Esperanto etc. It’s a light-hearted look at one of Peter Hammill’s favourite subjects, the unreliability of language. As Judge Smith says in the song, “The thing that’s said is not the thing that’s heard - that’s the trouble with the spoken word” - thus summing up in a couplet a subject that Hammill has worried over in a dozen or so different songs!
The album continues almost entirely in a similar vein - there are twelve tracks, taking it up to near-maximum CD length - even the slightly darker tone of ‘Place Of Your Own’ which is apparently about getting that first flat or home, ending with the vaguely amusing notion that you will get a final “place of your own” to rest in for all time. Chris Judge Smith obviously has a funny-bone which sticks above the surface like an open-cast coal mine. But, the humour never takes over completely, and ultimately it’s the music, sometimes lush, sometimes bouncing madly along, sometimes quite bizarre (for example the strange male-voice choir on ‘God Save The Tzar’) which justifies it all. I would have preferred to have heard it all played by real musicians, but the sampling is excellently done and in some ways it’s entirely appropriate that this faintly unreal brainchild should beam straight from his mind onto the disc. Now all you have to do is pick up a copy and beam it directly into your mind -there’s a whole world of discovery under that Dome!
(Seán Kelly)