Bassist Éric Normand runs this, the Tour de Bras label. P.O.W.E.R. is a trio plus two guests who play televisions, microphones and a few other normal instruments. Although I grew up watching a good deal of TV, especially in the sixties as child, I got tired of it and the way it both manipulated and pacified the masses in the seventies & eighties. I went back to watching a few shows in the nineties like Star Trek & North Exposure, but I eventually got rid of my television completely and just dealt with the computer and an occasion DVD film in recent years. Commercials have always bothered me. The sound of P.O.W.E.R. is a swirling collection of amplified noises, feedback, static and the sounds of the machines themselves. Ugly yet real. It is not that the sampling of televisions is new by any means, both Kramer in early Zorn game pieces made tapes taken from the TV & other sources and John Richey in Machine Gun sampled a television & radio on stage. Two of the four pieces here at live and two are recorded in a studio from what I can tell. The studio pieces sound more interesting to me, less disturbing. They contain quite a bit of microphones amplifying different objects or surfaces. Some of this reminds of Faust but without any their songs. The first piece seemed a bit indulgent, but the other three pieces actually worked as somewhat fascinating sonic weirdness. As they say in those cheap film reviews… your move.
