WOEBOT

Books on Tape
Dinosaur Dinosaur
Alien8

Listening to “Dinosaur Dinosaur” one gets an ironic frisson recalling Edgar Varese’s dreams for synthesised sound: “I myself would like, for expressing my personal conceptions a sound machine (and not a machine for reproducing sounds).” For here Books on Tape man one of Varese’s sound machines and are bent not on devising new soundscapes of originality and infinitude, but in pumping out crystal-clear frat rock. From John Wall to Public Enemy sampling performs an alchemical transmutation. Likewise electronic music strives for de-substantiation, swerves away from literalism, disguises instruments, veils voices in gauze. Books on Tape on the other hand use the studio as cheesily and refreshingly as a “Band-In-A-Box.”

Something like “Killing Machine” be eminently reproducible on drily-miked drum-kit, strat and synth, Todd Drootin doing his best keep his channels clear so each instrument feels separate. There’s precious little here that would stretch the chops of a nimble punk band. The effect of all this faithful reproduction, “Upon Rock City” is just waiting for a vocal by Lux Interior, is to exacerbate the jerkiness of Carducci-styled classic rock, to render it yet more wooden and charmingly moronic. Indeed it’s fascinating to speculate what Carducci (author of “Rock and the Pop Narcotic”), who celebrates this sound in the name of the usual group-interplay it is usually the product of, and yet abhors Brian Eno and his studio crimes, would make of this.

“Dinosaur Dinosaur” is a hell of a lot of fun. Drootin has a handle on all the qualities that make Rock a gas, its compulsive grooves, its resolute unpretentiousness its poppy hooks and if it’s hard to get a handle on why anyone would choose to rebuild rock like this then one’s too busy enjoying the racket to be unduly bothered. Besides, all too often in yielding to the imagined parameters of electronic instruments artists end up making finely-graded sludge, or Techno.