Born in Minnesota and raised in Missouri, Terre (pronounced "Terry") Thaemlitz
was an art student and a drag queen in New York in the mid 1980s when he
started a second life as a disc jockey for house parties.
Fascinated by the work of composers Pauline Oliveros and Robert Rich,
and by musique concrete, Thaemlitz recorded the pioneering single
Raw Through a Straw (Comatonse, 1993) and quickly
abandoned dance music to embrace ambient soundscapes with his solo recording
Tranquilizer (Instinct, 1994).
The album contains lengthy trancey pieces that rely mainly on electronic
keyboards although occasionally mix a bit of percussions, beat-boxes and
ethnic instruments:
040468 is eight-minutes of soothing, angelic drones and tinkling, set
to a mellow jazz-funk rhythm; Fat Chair is far-eastern chamber music
imbued with zen perfumes;
and Hovering Glows is a half-hearted attempt at new age lounge music.
But Thaemlitz's originality is more apparent in the compositions that bridge
the clubs and the avantgarde, dance beats and experimental noise:
Raw Through A Straw juxtaposes the "acid" phrases of a church organ and
an amorphous bass burbling, then spins an afro-dub beat scratched by metallic
dissonances;
A City on Springs indulges in haunting echoes and natural sounds,
like a field recording of drops falling in an underground cave
visited by dying birds;
2am on a Silo is perhaps the most desolate soundscape, crackling and
snapping under sunny clouds of rich electronic tones.
Meditation of the Mountain Oyster,
the only venture in the new genre of
transglobal dance (world-music set to a frantic dance beat) is still
unfocused and naive.
This formative work was followed by Soil (Instinct, 1995), that includes the
brainy Cycles,
and by a Bill Laswell collaboration,
Web (Subharmonic, 1996).
His compositions are only apparently quiet and relaxed. They are built from
a dense sludge of sonic events and processed with computers. The noise that
is compressed in their serene drones elicits overdoses of urban neurosis.
The political aspect of his art became more obvious
after (1997) he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area,
with the psyco-schizo-sexual essay
Couture Cosmetique (Caipirinha, 1997).
Harsh and convoluted compositions like
Silent Passability,
Residual Expectation,
Fragmentation/Standardization,
Facilitator ,
Abandoned Left,
Trans Am
stretch for about ten minutes toying with the subliminal effects of
mashed sounds.
His political, post-glam, approach to (trans) sexuality permeates all of his
writings, but hardly surfaces in the music, that could not be less "feminine".
G.R.R.L. (Comatonse, 1997) was a sarcastic parody of the fashionable
dance music of the time.
Thaemlitz' most accessible works are
a solo-piano tribute to Kraftwerk, Die Roboter Rubato (Mille Plateaux, 1997),
and a solo-piano tribute to Gary Numan, Replicas Rubato (Mille Plateaux, 1999), both accompanied by thoughtful, philosophical liner notes.
The theoretical component of the program gets a little out of hand with
Means From An End (Mille Plateaux, 1998),
Institutional Collaborative (Mille Plateaux, 1998),
Love For Sale (Mille Plateaux, 1999),
Interstices (Mille Plateaux, 2000),
all of them based on computer processing of found sounds.
Fagjazz (Comatonse, 2000) is a two-disc monolith. The first disc is
an anthology of early, hard to find tracks. The second disc is an hour of
improvisation with a jazz ensemble.
In 2001 he relocated to Japan.
There is still very little content on Lovebomb (Mille Plateaux, 2003),
yet another exercise in collage of samples and tape manipulation that rarely
(Between Empathy and Sympathy is Time, Sintesi Musicale del Linciaggio Futurista) elicits emotions and most often sounds like advertising for
the specific devices that he is using.
A new project, KS.HE (Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion), devoted to deep-house music,
debuted with Routes Not Roots (2006).
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