Yet another American flees from the extremes of modernism to the safety of the good old triad and the ubiquitous minimalist pulse. Daniel Lentz, once in the vanguard of American experimentalism, now signs his name to Beautiful Music, unashamedly sensual and deliberately anti-polemical. Notwithstanding the stroboscopic rhythms and the pan-consonance, these pieces really have nothing to do with the minimalist aesthetic. Collage structures, more stream-of-consciousness than process-like, ensure that everything remains fluid and unpredictable, unfolding as a chain of isolated events linked only by common phrase-lengths, harmonic identity and general character. Clever tricks with a bank of electronic keyboards and microcomputers give rise to plenty of high-gloss layer-upon-layer surface complexity, redolent of the pop scene and Terry Riley. Cheerily eclectic and no doubt thoroughly Californian it's music that amuses and bores in about equal measure.
Wild turkeys, played here on three synthesizers is the longest and most consequential piece on the record. Like a string of mixed beads, each tiny cell momentarily holds the attention, only to be forgotten instantly as it gives way to the charms of the next new harmony, timbre and texture. This is the only track for instruments alone; all the rest feature the strange, husky, boyish voice of Jessica Lowe, with its shades of scat and the pop backing-group. So fond is Lentz of perilous, irrational vocal lines that one quite forgives Lowe her precarious tunings, but even so they injure parts of the performances. George Stearns joins her for the wordless Lullaby, prettily dressed in bell-like accompaniments that seem at times to have been lifted straight out of Steve Reich's Music for Mallet Instruments and stuck back together in any old order. The dream king, also for both singers perplexes rather more: why Lentz should have dismembered Martin Luther King's most memorable words on freedom into a manic, inarticulate stuttering, set against an accompaniment that treads a path somewhere between minimalism and reggae, I am at a complete loss to understand. But then, Lentz has no truck with the conventions of rhetoric. The crack in the bell, opening the record, similarly toys with a strong text by e. e. cummings in a bleak succession of banalities. Should one laugh with it or at it? Perhaps one needs to be Californian to see the point.'