malcolm green: electric landlady

Malcolm Green (b. 1952) is a British artist, dancer, and publisher. His eccentric, liquid ideas seem to come with a smile. Or is it a wry grin? His colorful paintings, usually adorned with phrases, are little riddled plaques. Luckily, Malcolm is of the ilk of visual artists who also records audio works (this multiplicity is always interesting). Green's own label Seedy CDs/Sieh Dies issued a number of CDrs between 2000 and 2005, including many of his own works, along those by friends Jan Voss and a CDr reissue of Dieter Roth's classic Die Radio Sonate (2006). Green is, in fact, a member of the Dieter Roth Academy -- and furthermore gracefully ropes the pillars of Roth into his own artistic process. When Recital head Sean McCann approached Malcolm about republishing an album, Electric Landlady excited both of them immediately. It is the sound of an Epson 90-dot matrix printer running sheets of the score for John Cage's 4'33". It is piercing, though a world of ricocheting meaning can be uncovered in between the lines. Green says, "this particular rendering of Cage's handwritten score is in fact somewhat contrary to Cage's intentions, because every performance on the Epson 90 will be more or less identical. For this reason I have titled it differently: Electric Landlady -- in honor of a felicitous misprint of the famous Hendrix record I once encountered in Italy." The subsequent tracks are beautiful, harmonic re-renderings of the printer's voice, "played live without post-editing, with the (accidental) addition of a booming guitar sound that came with the PC program I was using." Electric Landlady concludes with a jaw dropping DJ-remix of the printer, with airplanes and dogs flying high above a field of beats. Includes four-page pamphlet holding program notes by Green; Edition of 150.