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Paradigm9:
Live at the Lost Dog
It is always difficult to get a good handle on soundtrack music especially music composed or performed for art installations and harder still when the original exhibit is unavailable to the listener. Yet that is what I am faced with in the case of Paradigm 9s Live at the Lost Dog. These seven tracks were, as the name suggests, performed live by the band in 2001 at Lost Dog Coffee in Shepherdstown, WV to accompany an art installation created by the band and Alex Baily. With no record of the exhibit on which to judge the appropriateness of the music to the exhibit or how the quality of the sounds immersed the spectator in the subject of the piece, all the reviewer can do is hold the music up on its own and assess it as an isolated art form. Not that this is too unfortunate on a website specifically devoted to musical content, it is just not often fair to music that is originally designed to be but a part of a larger work. Fortunately the folks behind Paradigm 9, the same who make up Good Lord Giveth, are a talented lot, and they are competent enough within the one art form to put together a mostly ambient sound barrage that can stand on its own. For me, the star of Live at the Lost Dog is the flute. So much of the other layers that make up the disc are your standard ambient affairs, chirping lines, wide open synth sweeps, subdued spoken vocals, and ethnic drums, but the flute adds a very breathy eastern voice that really highlights the mysterious quality of the other sound sources. The whole soundtrack is given a feeling of sophistication and worldliness by the simple, but very well executed, inclusion of the slowly developing world-music flavored flute. Other highlights include some low bass trickery and some nice raw synth lines in the later tracks that rose out of the ambient background really well. All in all, considering the lack of any framing background to understand the musical selection, I am amazed at how well the music is able to stand on its own. A solid and smooth ambient construction.
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