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February 1992 Discoveries column
Salvador Dali was known far beyond the artistic world for his flamboyance, grandstanding, outrageousness, and flair for the bizarre. Yet there is more to his work than mere garishness: Imagination as well as mystery permeate his paintings. The realistic renderings of animals and objects emphasizes their distortion and their enigmatic contexts on airless, desert-like landscapes. This elusive puzzle-like quality permeates the Coriolis CD Dali: The Endless Enigma. This nearly hour-long release maintains a bittersweet atmosphere of beauty and elegance. And while it features some major artists in electronic and new age music -- Steve Roach, Klause Schulze, Michael Stearns -- it also includes performances by such lesser-known talents as Walter Holland, Djam Karet, and Loren Nerell. Even with this number of contributors, Dali has a focus and continuity that are rare for compilation recordings. "I really expected to send some things back so that the pieces would fit together," admits executive producer and project participant Walter Holland. "But I didn't have to. I only had to worry about ordering. It was just a matter of shuffling the deck until I came up with the right sequence." But another contributor, Djam Karet's Chuck Oken, has a different impression: "We already had a Dali-inspired piece in the can and were ready to send it in. Then we found out who else was on the CD, so we went back to work on something that would fit in. . . . Nerell's contribution to Dali begins with shifting references to bells, voices and wind before settling into a vocal incantation. A polyrhythmic collection of drum sounds, rattles, kalimba buzzes, and balifon samples lifts the piece out of the vaporous ether of Dali's dreamscapes, providing the recording's most energetic and ebullient moment. Nerell's interest in world music extends back several years, but it didn't become a main pillar of his work until Book of Alchemy, his 1989 follow-up to his debut effort, Point of Arrival (both available from the composer). Executed with help from most of the members of Djam Karet, percussionist Mike Ezzo, Walter Holland, and vocalist Mari Fix, Alchemy is a musical kaleidoscope that juggles African, Asian, sacred, Aboriginal, Hindustani, Balkan, and modern musics into a single multifaceted image. "I'm very interested in continuing in this direction," says Nerell. "The new age and world music approaches are so complementary that it's a natural."
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