CT Recommends… Philip Kent Bimstein

So, at the end of day, everybody’s a little weird, right? At least I hope so or else good music would die.  Pop music covers all the usual day-to-day emotions of happy, sad, sleepy and “I just failed a test,” but it generally fails to cover that “I’m feeling a little wacky” emotion. Now I’ve got just the thing — Phillip Kent Bimstein.  His album “Garland Hirschi’s Cows,” released in 1996, was met with many positive reviews. Stereophile wrote that Bimstein “has used digital sampling technology to tell wry and moving stories and to elevate the mundane to the level of high art.”  My personal favrite track is “The Door”- — 10.5 minutes of sounds made by a particularly squeaky door.  But unlike some modern musicians, who would have maybe stopped at simply recording these sounds, Bimstein rearranges them and layers them until he somehow creates a soundscape that resembles  a wild jungle with the appropriate jungle animals.  I’m just saying that anybody who can make a door sound like an elephant in the wild is worth checking out.  The other songs feature samplings where you learn a little bit about Garland Hirshi’s cows, as can perhaps be gathered from the album title.  The  tapes also sample the mooing of the cows.  The taracks are played over some basic instrumentation consisting of percussion and occasional strings in the first part, keyboard in later parts. The first three tracks make up “Garland Hirschi’s Cows” parts one through three, and are followed  by the “Louie Louie Variations,” which are exactly what they sound like, and yet nothing at all like what you are expecting.  The next four tracks make up “Dark Winds Rising” parts one through four, followed by the aforementioned “The Door” and concludes with “Vox=Dominum.” In all, the 10 tracks last about an hour and are just the right thing when you’re in the mood for something  a little out there and informative… about cows.