Music: Future Perfect - Elizabeth Parker

 

Perfection can exist in art but is that what we really want?

The imperfect can be perfectly justifiable and yes even desirable.

Here, music by Elizabeth Parker proves that sound is more perfectible with the aid of machines. Of course. It's inevitable. But... 

Input from the mind of machine-music-maker is everything in the equation. Perhaps the artists is a Punk. Perhaps they are classically trained. Perhaps they are creatively limited, thinking that the machine will make up for their failings. It doesn't. It cannot.

These sounds were made, presumably, for TV, Radio or Film. You or I can imagine the stories, the scenes they accompanied. Many of the titles speak for themselves. Space Drift, Memory Loss, The Dying Of The Light etc. Siren-Call echoes György Ligeti's Lux Aeterna in abbreviated form. 

Cynically, one might say that the boom in Library music reissues was made for the short attention span era. Why work so hard at the lengthy intellectual efforts of Stockhausen or Xenakis when you can get a electronic fix in one-minute bursts? You should enjoy both, of course.

Future Perfect is a 24-track selection of electronic moods, all of which form a tapestry of various colours, from delicate, light shades to dark, ominous ones. You might say all life, on Mars and elsewhere, is here, the bad and the beautiful. It closes with the explosive percussion of Why Me? Why Elizabeth Parker? Why now? Thanks to Trunk Records' dedication to unearthing the other side of Parker, her 'dark' side, away from the limelight of work for popular, mainstream TV, you can hear why.