$16.99
available through
Bestboy Music
Reviewed by William Dean
(05/01/02)
Last weekend, St. Louis played host to a fetish event whose title is a pun on an old Tin Pan Alley tune: "Beat Me in St. Louis." That seems an appropriate jumping-off point to discuss the music of transplanted Texan, Robert Lloyd Anderson, who now makes his home in The City Beneath the Silver Arch.
When you get a bad feeling in your gut, then I know I've succeeded.
--Robert Lloyd Anderson
For sophisticated listeners of so-called "background music" who cut their teeth on musical
delights such as Brian Eno, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream, and Vangelis, Robert Lloyd
Anderson's second CD Wet will join that exalted pantheon with flying colors.
Anderson unabashedly writes background music for the darker sexual scenes and
sub-space pleasures. Like the soundtracks to Blade Runner and Sorcerer, the beat is
elusive yet steady with repetitive upward sweeps and glides that -- punctuated by the slap
of crop, flogger, or whip -- don't so much ease the pain as darken and shadow the ripples.
It's been said, poetically, that each turn of the screw, each caress of the teasing feather,
each touch of the leather strap, is like a succeeding drop of water on a surface that sends
out widening concentric circles of sensation. So, too, the sound waves of Anderson's
tracks cause widening gyres in the sexual imagination.
"I don't like to be controlled by a rhythm track," Anderson says. "These days it's very
easy to get a nice drum beat (usually someone else's) by pushing buttons on a computer.
You don't have to listen very long to realize that the music I do is totally free-form. I
never use canned rhythms or rifts. I'm not sure I could."
Minimalist composers, including Philip Glass and Wendy Carlos, control their curiously
lilting rhythms as tightly as any Master or Mistress, raising the levels sometimes in the
tiniest increments to accentuate the sudden thrust, the unexpected snap, the dam-breaking
twist.
"Most people fantasize about things they don't do in real life. Truth is, they really want
to."
Robert Lloyd Anderson -- one imagines -- plays some passionately dark fantasies in his
mind as he composes. He claims that there are no concrete pictures, no specific acts, just
feelings. Perhaps, like fleeting dreams, the scenes he plays under his own influential
musical glissandos are so ephemeral that he cannot articulate them in words. That's
understandable in a musician. It is the successive notes and the building up of structures
which -- like an S/M or D/s scene -- transcend normal communication skills. He is
generous to share them with others so that they may invent and re-invent their own to his
transportive musical accompaniment.
"I get off knowing that people are doing some wild things with it because I feel I'm a part of that, too."
Like his previous "scene CD" Idolitry, the track names for Wet are provocative and
poetic: "Thirst & Desire," "Lost boy Found," "Nowhere to hide," "Chance of Showers," "Depth"
(Parts I and II), "Sweet Capture," and the title piece: "Wet."
Anderson's CDs are available through Bestboy Music. You can sample some of
Anderson's work at his Web site. After listening, you may find
yourself, well, Wet.
