Seance Centre Canada レコード& CD

Review: Ontario, Canada based Seance Centre returns with a collection of songs by Californian voice artist and poet MJ Lallo. The works on this double LP compilation were all recorded in her home studio between 1982 and 1997, where she used digital processing techniques to create harmonising mantras layered with drum machine rhythms. Although Lallo's flight path is distinctly her own, her journey converges with other travellers as diverse as Jon Hassell, Laraaji, Stereolab, William Aura, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, Gertrude Stein and even Terry Gilliam - whose film Brazil was a big influence on her.

Review: It would be fair to say that MJ Lallo has enjoyed an eclectic career, juggling composing music for the likes of NASA and the Vatican Observatory with professional voiceover artist. Last year, Full Spectrum Records reissued her superb, self-funded, cassette-only 1988 debut album, The Channeled Voice and now Brandon Hocura's Seance Centre is preparing to put out a double-album of archive, unreleased material. This taster 12" is little less than superb, bouncing between the Herbie Hancock style, synthesizer-heavy jazz-funk of "Star Child Going Home" and the gentle downtempo bliss of the breezy "Aquarius Blue". Best of all, though, is the ethereal, new age influenced B-side "Deep Dreams", a synthesizer-and-voice composition aptly described by Hocura as an "an entrancing meditation".