The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 28

3 Dugites and their synthesisers take a middle road I 1 No Money, The Dugites (Rough Diamond through Polygram RDM 8805). The Dugites have been through personnel changes and have also swapped record v' companies. Their new, five- tract mini album takes its name from the single No ifoney, which is the Dugite version of a ballad with lots of synthesisers. I find this the least satisfying of the Dugites' material but, as the charts testify, the public is crying out for more ballads, so good luck to them. All five songs are Peter Crosbie compositions it is his witty songwriting style which is the basis of the Dugites' success.

Over the past two years, the band have jelled so that their playing here is the strongest yet, as shown in Poor Daughter and Desired. This is a crucial record for the Dugites: their first album was regarded as pop, their second as a bit way out This one correctly places the band between the two. No Money is a good record and I hope it is the stepping stone to the Dugites being as powerful and exciting on vinyl as they are on stage. Primitive Man, Icehouse (Regular through WE A RRLP 1204). If you and your band had one of the most successful Oz albums of 1981, what would be your next step? Break up the band and wait almost two years; before 'releasing another album? It doesn't sound like the best commercial tactic, but it is what Iva Davies of Icehouse has done.

Primitive Man is the work of Iva Davies using guitar, bass, synthesisers and a dram machine. He has retained the name Icehouse and is forming a six-piece band to work under that title. This album was recorded in Sydney and Los Angeles with the help of Keith Forsey, an American drummer and producer. Because there was only one musician involved in most of the recording, the album was put together quite qukkly with Iva Davies writing several of the songs in the studio. The big trap with stacks of synthesisers, a drum machine and a 24-track tape recorder is The Dugites working at being as exciting on vinyl as they are on stage.

1 Disciples of the void first released as the flip side of the previous Icehouse single, Love In Motion. Among the other tracks are Hey Little Girl, where the vocals are like the guy in Japan during his best Bryan Ferry imitation, and Giant which is a fun instrumental dedicated to Clam rock stars from Gary Glitter and Marc Bolan to Adam Ant. Primitive Man has a few weak moments: Trojan Blue is in the Great Southern Land style but never works up enough energy. But then this is only the second album from Icehouse and already there is a cogent style where the successes far outweigh the failures. Iva Davies has taken on musical technology and made it work for his songs and produced a much better album than most people Would have expected.

Stuart Matchett that you can end up with a lot of songs that sound depressingly alike. Iva Davies doesn't have this problem because he is prepared to play and experiment with the electronic toys at his disposal. He also draws on a wide range of musical influences which gives Primitive Man more variety than you'd expect from a synthesiser-based album. It has to be remembered that Davies is a guitarist. He uses the instrument to give a rasping attack to Uniform and Break These Chains and to color every song on the album.

You have probably already heard the single Great Southern Land with its- hypnotic synthesisers and lyrics about our isolated, island home. Goodnight Mr Matthews features an almost-60s, psychedelic vocal and a Robert Fripp wall-of-backwards-guitars solo. It was Janacek gets soft treatment NEW MUSIC FOR A NEW AGE. For Health and Relaxation Eioysom of ttw most MMvaniy music you have Mr nurd soothing, raining music that transports you beyond space and tme. Or Steven HaJpemi eataneive raining in brain science and psychology is combined nutria ram gift of psychic Mnsjtrvtfv to trt music at the soneres.

The musical vision of StovwHalpemr received iraornalional recognition. Ha is acclaimed by weti known paychic reaeefch, sudjecta aa well as by many thousands of satisfied ttstenere. Jo Laam how sounds affect the body and mind. Kacover the benefits of Hatoom Mb oounos. Send only $2.50 (or cost packing.

Refunded on first order. Halpern Sounds, The Lotus Book Centre, 43 Queen St, Woottahra, NSW 2025 Tel. (02)322898 Searching For Satori, Bauhaus (PowderworkS Records, through RCA, POWT 2006). Somewhere in the dim memories of Oriental gropings for meaning, truth and the Zen way of life, I recollect the meaning of satori. Well, who cares now.

Also somewhere is a vague definition of the Bauhaus, a very popular term now among art students wishing to bestow on their strivings a touch of fair-dinkum, German-Berlin, frontal-lobe insight. Bauhaus was the name of a German art school founded in. 1919 at Weimar by Walter Groupius. Why we can't use Darlinghurst, Glebe or even Bondi as self-conscious, artistic labels is a mystery, but the same fear is manifested in the northern English group Bauhaus, and their mini-EP Searching for Satori. They should have called themselves The Northamptons and the EP Echoing in the English Fog.

Formed out of a punk band which flourished in 1977 for three gigs, Bauhaus is four young men who see themselves as having a "Gothic romantic element" as well as Bauhaus modernism. The four tracks on this EP bounce around the current sounds to be found in a black nihilism characteristic of certain British music. The music trips and moans and whines and suffers tics and would like to be The Fall and occasionally whinnies out on a space journey but quickly returns to urban blank-ness. Bauhaus is a strong example of a component breakdown, without the nervousness. This is mechanised, unemotional head music.

Take a wail echoing in the background, highlight some alarming noise, turn down the lights to dim, say nothing and bask in the gloom. And after all that? This is a fine EP for post-modernistic disciples of the void. If you are a Fall addict, you will like Bauhaus. Eye In The Sky, The' Alan Parsons Project (Arista, through Festival, RMLD 53016). This hit album rolls from frankly commercial, highly competent pop to some outstanding instrumentals.

If you haven't had a dose of this LP yet, get it now. easy-rolling tunes with -post-hippy lyrics, such as the track Children of the Moon. There's the delightfully sophisticated pop Of the track Psychobabble; a popular-music rock number titled You're Gonna Get Your Fingers Burned; harmonious tunes all culminating, for this reviewer, in the outstanding instrumental track Mammagamma. But to get to this, you have to wade through the orchestrally flour ising Gemini. This is Moody-BIues-type, etheral pop that lacks the Moody Blues magic.

The Project comes from the inspiration of Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson, whoso original idea it was six years ago to make the first Alan Parsons Project album. The vision of Parson and Woolfson of classical rock-pop put to themes of ambitious artistry it some of the most creative work being done now. Susan MoIIoy Janacek, Glagolitic Mass, soloist with the City of Birmingham Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Simon Rattle (HMV ASD 4066). One of the most thrilling sounds in music is Janacek's Glagolitic Mass in full cry. It is a setting of the Mass text as preserved in an archaic Slavonic language.

Janacek wrote it in the wonderfully productive and exuberant final years of his creative career. It has the feverish energy of his best muslo together with a hewn and clamorous strength of utterance. It is certainly among the very greatest mass settings. The young British conductor, Simon Rattle, directs his Birmingham-based orchestral and choral forces in a vigorous and well-judged performance. Felicity Palmer does some clever and attractive things in the soprano solos, though the most striking singing comes from a veteran tenor, John Mitchinson, whose work has rarely appealed to me as much as it does here.

But some raw excitement, some feeling of fierce stress, is missing from this eloquent but over-polite performance. I listened to the recording by Bernstein and his New York forces (not in the catalogue at the moment, I believe) to see if I was wrong in remembering it as having a far more abrupt and startling kind of impact The contrast proved even stronger than I had expected. There are one or two other recorded versions that score in the same way through a greater degree of commitment In their instrumental and choral attack. The Rattle version will do quite well as an introduction to the work. Its qualities as a recording are superior in general to those of its rivals.

I do not think it will be long, however, before an equally good recording presents a far more vociferous and directly challenging account of the work. Weber, Symphonies Nos 1 and 2, Academy of St Martin In the Fields conducted by Neville Marrlaer (ASV digital DCA 515). We don't say led or even directed by Neville Marriner these days. Marriner has become a full-time conductor, working with his Minnesota orchestra In the United States and travelling the conductors international circuit Happily, he still returns to conduct the Academy that he did more than any one else to make famous. Whenever he does, the crispness of the playing, the thoroughly Janacek thrilling sounds.

Attention Music Lovers! WOOLLAHRA ELECTRONICS has some of the finest audio components on demonstration in Sydney Nairn, Linn, Luxman. Nakamichi, D.C.M. Sony, to name a few. We have the expertise to advise you how to IMPROVE your sound system. Did you know that our FREE CARTRIDGE ALIGNMENT 6AU6E win hefp obtain maximum detail from your record grooves by preventing stylus mistracklng.

Did you know that simply exchanging your speaker wire for higher quality cable can make nuuio come to life? We design audio systems to suit your budget, musical taste and living room. thought-out phrasing and brilliant contrasts of the performances are invariably supported by recordings of fine quality. So it is here. The music recorded is the work of Weber when he was 20 and temporarily obliged to be behave like a court composer of the Haydn type, producing new symphonies to please a cultivated princely master. Each of these symphonies is in major and each is some way from ranking as a masterpiece.

All the same, the two works seem to me to speak of the identity of their composer much more openly than tome people are inclined to admit. There are characteristically theatrical touches in these pieces, come delightful subsidiary scenes (often better than the principal motives) and even one or two bogeyman flourishes that seem to look forward to what the romantic opera composer was to become. Your record collection will not have conspicuous gaps if it Is without these symphonies; but performance and recording argue persuasively for the youthful merit of these capably turned works. Roger Corel! BE DELIGHTED BY REAL MUSIC AT I WOOLLAHRA ELECTRONICS 290 Oxford Street, Bond! Junction 3871647 389 9825 Trade-ins welcome. Open 4 pm Saturdays The Guide, SMH, Monday, Sept 13, 1982.