special x
Leslie Stuck

Pas

Cycling '74 008

Electronic music and modern dance make great bedfellows, as proven by composer Leslie Stuck's latest CD Pas. Although dance is by its very nature a corporeal activity inseparable from the laws of physics, Stuck counterbalances by creating an intriguing sound world that skirts the line between materiality and cyber-possibilities. Listening to Pas is like experiencing a Janet Cardiff audio walk—everything sounds familiar and at the same time completely surreal. By combining his own real-world samples with some out-of-this-world digital processing, Stuck creates meta-instruments that constantly morph into bewildering constellations: a hi-hat cymbal blurs into a knife blade being sharpened, a guitar suddenly unzips revealing a human voice or maybe a symphony of barnyard animals—it's hard to quantify things inside this slippery world where Stuck seems to play with our sonic sense of mass and scale by means of half-recognizable reference points. As with most music composed specifically for dance, rhythm is heavily emphasized, here spiked with hints of glitch and dub, as well as requisitely complex, new music anti-grooves that energetically propel the music and inspire movement.

—RN

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