Bill Laswell
Emerald Aether: Shape Shifting
Shanachie 78035; 50 minutes; 2000
Transmigration, or the ability to “shape-shift” through
different bodies and even alternate realities, holds a mystical place in the
deep wellspring of art, history, folklore and magic – both natural and
supernatural – that is Ireland.
So claims William Murphy in the
opening sentence to his notes on Emerald Aether, thus setting the tone
for some of the most baffling gobbledygook ever inflicted upon an album, but
undeniably appropriate to this woeful CD, subtitled Reconstructions of Irish
Music. 
Elsewhere Murphy writes:
Recombined, reconfigured, even remixed [his bold type], Irish art may owe a debt to the foreign influences of its past and the unforeseen paths of its wanderings to come, yet somehow for these very reasons it remains distinctly Irish to its core.
Ignoring the fundamental
impossibility of anybody or anything owing a debt to its own future, this
sentence supposedly offers justification for employment of the techno-whiz kid
Laswell to wreak untold havoc on selected works from the catalogues of Jerry
O’Sullivan, Solas, Karan Casey, Cathie Ryan and even Matt Molloy.
Clearly, someone somewhere in the
Shanachie echelons had been given one of the Cream Ibiza chill-out CDs as a
birthday present and decided Irish traditional music was game for a remix job
(or rather, to allude to the album’s subtitle, reconstruction). Palpably, it
was not and is not, as one listen to Laswell’s murderous destruction of Matt
Molloy’s The Hare in the Heather proves in one awesome swoop.
Don’t purchase this; don’t even
buy it for an enemy. If you come across a copy, return it to Shanachie with
“Not Wanted on Voyage” stamped on the case.
Written by Geoff Wallis for TIMR.
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