To be completely honest, when I was read that the next album in my queue to be reviewed was considered “Trip Hop/Ambient”, I had quite a different picture in my mind. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, remains to be seen, but as a word of warning, this is definitely not something you’d find on the Ninja Tune label. That’s not to say it’s bad, because it’s not, but I guess I just associate trip hop with the likes of Kid Koala and the like, and this is definitely different.

Rather than use more natural sounds like didgeridoos or bongos or flutes, Bonini uses rather synthetic sounding synthesizers, which unfortunately give his tracks an initial air of elevator music rather than interesting downtempo. Yet again, it’s not terrible, and after a few minutes of listening, you can obviously tell a lot more work went into producing these songs than is first noticeable, there are those first few seconds where you have to endure the cheap feeling before you get to the much meatier core.

While I was still in Bermuda, I happened to be casually surfing the internet, and came across an excerpt of a book recently published by a woman named Elizabeth de la Vega. I’m not a big book reader, but the premise of the book was rather interesting: how an attorney could bring about a charge of fraud against George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell for conspiring to lie to the public and to congress about the validity and truthfulness of facts that were presented when it was being decided whether or not the United States would go to war with Iraq. Now I can hear you say to yourself that this topic has had myriad articles, books, advertisements and speeches published about it already and that there’s no need for yet another collection of it. “We get it,” you say, “he lied. I’m sick of people telling me.”

What makes this book different are two major points. The first is that it’s presented not in typical book form, but in the style of a court reporter’s transcript. Rather than being a one way dialogue that the reader is forced to take part in, they are simply observers in the courtroom, listening to the back and forth discussion of the witness, attorney, and occasionally the grand jury. Rather than “he said”/”she said” and all the other variations that authors are forced to used scattered over the page, it’s presented in a form closer to the following (excerpt from page 128):

Recently I was asked to review a CD by Stabilizer, the group who put out “A Project Called Red” which I reviewed here some time ago. Up to their old tricks again, the two original “Stabilizers” Ian Siegert and Brad Podray plus new member Dan Dolan put forth another quality release on Nonexistant Recordings. Combining elements of rock, IDM, glitch, salsa, and even (though they may deny it) some pop, they seem to enjoy breaking down definitions of musical genres for their own pleasure.

This is all made even more amazing when you realize that the three members have never even met.

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