Living Inside Design (Remastered)

In "Soul Menu" there is some excellent, positive spirited pattern music combined with rock and soul music instrumentation and rhythmic support, material developed for one of Rouse's groups Broken Consort, which plays his more concert-oriented music. (Tirez Tirez is his pop group.) Simultaneous gamelan-like phrases of seven and eight beats occur in "Hope Chest," a tongue in cheek jazz riff in the lively "Ranger," group rhythm studies in "Copperhead" and "Leading the Machine." The CD Living Inside Design continues many of these sounds and techniques but applies them to an excellently produced sequence of songs that goes from the almost-pop "Forever Tonight" to the heartfelt "Kiss Him Goodbye" ("Mouth congress: a kiss, a second parade/An orgy of logic, a romance replayed/And up to the minute, a best out of three"), in which multiple voices occur in an overlay and deconstruction technique Rouse calls "counterpoetry," backed up with vocal and instrumental drones over a beat. Like Arthur Russell, Rouse at times creates that peculiar cosmically "airy" sound associated in pop music with Julee Cruise, the Cocteau Twins, early Fleetwood Mac, and even the Tuff Records version of "Sally, Go 'Round the Roses." After this, Rouse worked on an opera based on Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Rovi