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Dallas
resident Richard Thiesen has had a long and successful
career as a songwriter soundtrack composer, and theater
performer that has been successful enough to see hi
earn a Grammy for his song "Rock n Roll Me Again",
which appeared on the Beverly Hills Cop
soundtrack. This CD is a collection of electronic
compositions written over a period of seven years
that are loosely organized along the lines of a story
of an eighth century poet who meets one of the sisters
in the Pleiades constellation. It classifies itself
as "smooth jazz, new age and world beat".
The story is a good idea certainly, although listening
to the CD one senses that the Pleiades story is no
more than a failed attempt to give structure after
the fact to a scattershot assortment of MIDI-generated
production music tracks. Production music, also known
as library music, is copy-free (meaning you don't
have to worry about copyright infringement problems
when you buy it) music that radio stations use as
background music in commercials. As it is created
to be musical wallpaper, this type of music is quite
boring to listen to by itself. This type of music
often sounds "canned", as if it came out
of a machine or off of a factory belt instead of out
of a human being.
Completely MIDI-generated compositions often suffer
from being boring because they do not allow for the
natural ebb and flow of dynamics. Dynamics and the
human voice are the living elements of music. The
human ear longs for life in music, which is why it
is rare for Top 40 songs to be completely instrumental
and why it is equally rare for symphonic music to
say at the same volume and tempo all the way through.
 The
challenge for electronic music composers is to trick
the ear into thinking the electronic sounds are human-generated,
which is something Yaz, The Human League, Depeche
Mode, and Suicide all did well, hence the popularity
of those groups. This can be accomplished by balancing
the electronic sounds with live instrumentation, such
as drums, vocals, or guitars, or it can be done by
mixing the electronic elements carefully to give the
illusion of human dynamics.
Mr.
Thiesen almost succeeds in accomplishing the addition
of the human element in the two vocal tracks, which
are by far the best tracks on the album, but then
succeeds in bungling these two songs up so badly that
they are practically unlistenable. "Oceanova
17" would have been a stellar little track, as
it puts the listener in a boat gliding silently on
a still, glassy sea on a starry, moonlit night, and
then suddenly makes an angel/goddess appear in front
of the boat. But then Mr. Thiesen gets the bright
idea to treat the vocals with that annoying, bloopy
"robot" sound introduced on Cher's "Do
You Believe in Life After Love?" single that
was subsequently used on every other candy- coated
blow-pop single thereafter for about three years.
This association as well as the outright stupidity
of the sound completely ruins the song. The other
song, "The Passage", suffers from poorly
written lyrics that reflect the unhealthy but massively
popular notion that one can find their identity a
relationship with another person, which, coupled with
a massive lack of dynamics, sinks this one as well.
So what are we left with? A collection of overpriced
production music that isn't even
copy-free. If you really want to listen to production
music we recommend purchasing a legitimate production
music library. If you want vibrant easy-listening
instrumental music in this vein, we recommend Manneheim
Steamroller's Fresh Aire series, Camel's
all-instrumental concept album The Snow Goose
(1975), and Happy the Man's mostly instrumental masterpiece
Crafty Hands (1978).
--David Gasten,
dallasmusic.com
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