P G R
"The Morning Book of Serpents"


r e v i e w s


Morning Book of Serpents


Pulse Magazine / Sept 95

PGR is/was Silent Records owner Kim Cascone, whose experiments in what rec.music.ambient's denizens term Dark Ambient are surveyed on "The Morning Book of Serpents": nine segments of atmospheric obfuscations certain to enhance any seance. As exemplified by a pair of "extractions" -- Cascone's term for tweaking "found" audio material until it's rendered unrecognizable -- PGR is that rare entity in the overcrowded field of desktop musicmakers: hunter/gatherer. While couch potato DJs hoard Roland patches and sample movies of the week, Cascone actually gets out in the world, slices off a slab and struggles with it, a true sculptor of sound. So while many ambient contemporaries compose music for video games, "The Morning Book of Serpents" breathes like a city street.



WSUC-FM / October 95

By bad trip, I man BBBBBAAAD trip. This CD is so ambient that it makes all others shrivel up and decay. Kim Cascone has melted sound onto this CD. Playing it will release a soupy fog of emotions. At points I think that I am in the Labyrinth of "Hellraiser 2". Kim picks up the dentist tools and proceeds to pick at your skull. He then injects pure sound into your head and watches the results. If you play it on your car stereo...don't leave your car at night!! If you play it in your bedroom...leave the lights on!!! Don't play it unless you are ready to suffer the consequences.

Kim Cascone has proved himself the master of ambient with true EMOTION... PGR is an ambient CD that I simply cannot stop listening to. Mixmaster Morris, watch out!!!


huH Magazine, The Techno Issue

Though he's spent most of his recent days running the great San Francisco experimental/ambient/techno label Silent, Kim Cascone still remembers his past as a mad creator of music sound sculptures (think Tangerine Dream meets nine inch nails's noisiest moments). Collecting nine unreleased tracks from '84-'92, Morning Book wraps up the loose ends, serves as a companion to his one full album, Chemical Bride. A few tunes do opt for the noise-as-music motif (some cross the line vehemently), while others rely more on atmosphere than solid material, but all push the definition of "music" into untouched realms.




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