Gregory T.S. Walker - Minstrels & Minimoogs

Freedom To Spend extend their uncommon¢ series with a fourth offering of fringe experimentation, this time revisiting the ultra-obscuro 1988 work of virtuoso composer, Gregory T.S. Walker. The son of a Pulitzer Prize for music winner and graduate of several different musical schools, most tellingly perhaps Mills College, Walker's sole recording was a single-sided, self-released 12" recorded in his brother's apartment with a range of musicians of varying aptitude drawn from his University of Colorado Boulder collegiate (another institution from which he was to gain a degree). Informed by the multimedia performances previously encountered at Mills, and conceptually referencing both Ancient Egyptian mythology and the proto-surrealism of Hieronymus Bosch, Minstrels & Minimoogs is a wild ride of radical electronics and prog-ish fantasy that's unafraid to play free and easy with notions of convention. Comparisons to Robert Ashley and Blue Gene Tyranny immediately come to mind, aligning as it does abstracted poetry, inverted rock dynamics (the guitars on the closing track really dial up the rock opera histrionics) and a vanguard-like approach to the possibilities of modern composition, while precedent for such endeavour can be found in the respective canons of Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier and the Cramps imprint. If Walker's upbringing and education are key to his interests, then equal credit must also be afforded to his instinctive exploratory zeal given he self-funded a record very few people in Boulder at the time would have had much context for. I suppose you could label that 'visionary' and decades later Minstrels & Minimoogs does still sound unique, odd and, at times, even a little inscrutable. It can at times be a hard one to bend your head around and for all its institutional background, presents as highly outsider, the sound of someone pressing at the limits of their own eccentricity while bringing several others along for the ride. That this was to be one of Walker's only recorded works is unusual but likely telling - even in the grand history of American avant garde music is space made for music with such an absurdist, iconoclastic fervour.