Eden Mulholland: Music for Dance (Isaac)

Probably this shouldn't work. Music for dance pieces have to be special to exist without the moving images -- and yet in theory they should be able to do exactly that.

These do.

Eden Mulholland has written for numerous New Zealand dance productions and is the singer-songwriter in the rock band Motorcade, but here he collects 23 discreet, mostly electronic pieces which utilise backward tapes, bubbling electronica, distant voices, subtle beats, prepared piano, odd instrumentation and so on.

These self-contained musical pieces (some as short as a minute, others stretching towards six and seven minutes) bring to mind the more experimental work of Arthur Russell, the ambient work of Brian Eno, German groups like Cluster, and the "fourth world" music of Jon Hassell.

Stories aren't so much told here as suggested (that is in the nature of their origins I guess) but as a collection of pieces which had diverse original purposes this hangs together extremely well as a predominantly instrumental album to become immersed in.

The first of a series apparently. Good. I certainly look forward to more.