Paul Dickow is an extraordinary musician from Portland. The spectrum of various musicians from his city with whom he cooperated is rather wide: starting with the drummer in punk group Emergensy and keyboard player from jazz/post rock group Fontanelle to the project Nudge. Dickow partially promoted the image of Portland as the centre of American hyper-intellectual underground of prodigy youth. He also helped the Japanese painter Sawako and took an active part in the creative work of Honey Owens (Valet).Strategy is a solo project formed in 1999, in 2001 anybody except the project's friends hardy knew about its existence. Nowadays their collection includes three full-value albums on the label Kranky.
Music For Lamping is the absolute opposite of the previous, rather successful Future Rock, it's the collection of short Paul's stories of the last six years. Some of the compositions were unknown during a long period of time (one of them from the cancelled release for Tigerbeat6 dates to 2002). Despite such age of the records they still sound perfectly as if they had been recently composed.
As we listen to the album for the first time we have some delusive feeling of simplicity. The instrumentality is represented by the model of granular synthesis with spring reverberator, vocoder and other filters. Through these filters the author launches chaotic fragments of different records - the sounds of wind, rain, leaves, acoustic instruments and so on. Plus repetitive emotional progression loops of rustles with moire effect. All this reminds of a fine clash of sounds from the past produced by an aluminic pipe accidentially found in the house at night.
Charming blocks of thoughtful, anxious rustles with atmosphere clutters, perverted voices lost in time and space ("Bike Click"). Drifting organ with ringing bells in a botomless well ("Cathedral Spark") like the Carroll's Alice. Wonderful!
- Audio Dregs