By the age of 22, Angus Maclise had studied Haitian drumming, medieval European music, jazz, Latin, ballroom, military drumming and freeform percussion. Then his life really became interesting. In 1964, Maclise traveled and studied ethnic percussion in Morocco. That was just prior to co-founding the Velvet Underground, from which he was soon dismissed. Then onto Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, all before departing this world from Nepal in 1979.

One might guess that Maclise was a virtuoso John McLaughlin-type, but he was actually less concerned with drumming and more concerned with the avant-garde movement, the tape recorder and, more specifically, serialism: a method of composition whereby a series of numbers is applied in order to displace the composer and create a sense of randomness. Maclise may have viewed himself as a composer, albeit one who worked on a tape recorder instead of a staff. But to the unconvinced, Maclise's music sounds like the answering machine recordings of an imbecile banging around the house. Many of the selections on the two-disc set, The Cloud Doctrine, were in fact recorded in Tony Conrad's New York City apartment, and may have been just that.

The electronics of the "Tunnel Music" series pre-date glitch by thirty years and sound like cats being dropped on trashcan lids. On "Thunder Cut," his cimbalom work perpetuates in seeming randomness for 32 minutes with gamelan-like overtones -- full of the mystery of ancient musics, but hardly listenable. His electronic manipulations are vulgar, or haunted, or full of fruitless pounding like the sound of monkeys let loose in a woodshop. To Maclise, the ultimate time signature is the uncountable 1/1.

And to Maclise, God might have been as everything-less as white noise. This is his own take on world music, a priori to our modern day Epcot view. Maclise heard other things than the obvious ceremonial details, and in the same way brought the avant-garde and serialism to the table from his own culture. I wonder if the lessons learned from other musics helped validate these otherwise unlistenable Western ideas to Maclise, because they don't work for me. Mostly I just feel sorry for Tony Conrad's downstairs neighbors.

Jonathan Donaldson