Tony Buck/Rik Rue “Come Let Us Build Ourselves A City” digital

Description

This mid-1990s collaborative EP was originally released on mini-CD (by Berlin label, Algen), but has been included here as a worthy addendum to the Rik Rue cassette archive as a unique collaboration between two giants of Australian improvised and experimental music. Both artists expressed their willingness for Come Let Us Build Ourselves A City to be made available again, identifying it as a recording each still have a lot of affection for. Buck brings his array of drums and percussion, along with drum machines, and Rue mangles it all through analogue and digital filters, mashed with his collection of samples, a sonic portrait of a devastated and divided city reborn.

A double improvisation of Buck on drums and electronic percussion devices, embellished and corrupted by Rue’s electronics and samples played through minidisc recorders set to shuffle, the collection of pieces push the density of signals to the brink of noise. Technology allows each musician to be their own Sixties happening in terms of immersion in omni-attentiveness. With such abundance, pacing or restraint in exposition are irrelevant: the energy is unstinting and phrasing can be confrontingly abrupt – Boring Like A Drill.