In his book This Is Your Brain On Music, Daniel J. Levitin discusses how the human brain interacts with music in many facets. One of these is the manner in which our minds can instinctively create ‘expectations’ about the melodic course of a piece of music. If a motif, or chord progression, does not meet those expectations in resolution, then the piece can become subconsciously unpalatable and, thus, consciously disagreeable to listen to. This may precipitately create a bias against so-called experimental music, because of its inherent need to push those sorts of boundaries. With that in mind, I still believe that ‘expectations’ summoned forth while listening to a piece of music must still be met on some level and should be held as characteristic of import when judging that piece of music. I can say that Centrozoon has certainly succumbed to this error, to my ears at least, with their latest release Lovefield.

It may be an attribute of so-called experimental music to be meandering, but that is primarily what turned me off while listening to Lovefield. In its structure, er, make that lack of structure, I am taken back in time to when I was 19, did a lot of psychedelic drugs, bought an old Gretsch guitar and would play for hours with the delay pedal and my friend on bass. In short, at the time I thought it was cool sounding (probably was) because I wanted to be Syd Barrett, but it sucked and wanked in grand fashion. I have come to the aesthetic opinion that even just a little structure is good if you are attempting to communicate much of anything more than schizophrenia in your music. Markus Reuter and Bernhard Wostheinrich, aka Centrozoon, do certainly make some interesting sounds, it’s just a pity they can’t reign it in and mold their ideas into more appealing pieces (each “Field” 1-5 wanders through the musical ether without resting in any one place).  Each piece actually has the feel of 3 to 4 individual pieces carelessly mashed into one. Back to the positive, though, there is a creepy texture about halfway through “Field 1” that immediately brought to mind some Japanese horror flick, say, The Grudge.

Overall, the album pops unpredictably like a thunderstorm and the guitar tone sits comfortably in that same old annoyingly clean New Age guitar sound. I just can’t dig it and it may be due to expectations that cannot be met.

-Gabriel Bogart