Third in a series of ‘Syntheties’ by The Tape-beatles

‘The Grand Delusion’ CD is Soundtrack for PolyVision work

Hear some
sample tracks
from our recordings

DISCOGRAPHY FILMOGRAPHY
Audio • Minneapolis Summit (MiniCD) • Numbers (9-inch EP) • Good Times • Matter • The Grand Delusion • Music with Sound • A subtle buoyancy of pulse
Video • Minneapolis Summit (Mini VideoCD) • Matter (video) • The Grand Delusion (video)

At the time of its release in 1993, “The Grand Delusion” showed the Tape-beatles setting off in a new musical direction, delivering their most complex and musical work to date. The signature found vocals and sound effects are still to be found, but to this they add energetic rhythms, urgent melodic patterns, and plaintive singing voices, using the same modified symphonic structure they applied to their previous major work, Music with Sound. Dean Suzuki, writing in Option no. 57, says:

… The results are variously chilling, moving, humorous, tragic, outrageous, and always both provocative AND musical. The music works in concert with the spoken texts, just as the piano accompaniment comments upon and supports the text and melody of an art song by Schumann. There is a glut of musique concrète which is just so much noise, but a dearth of that which is as musical as this.

The CD includes the entire soundtrack of the Tape-beatles’ PolyVision ‘expanded cinema’ piece, also called The Grand Delusion. To this has been added a substantial amount of additional audio material to enrich the main themes, which center on how war today is waged as much in the psychological theatre as it is on the battlefield.

This, the re-issued version, appearing seven years after its first release, adds some twenty minutes of never-before released works to the track sequence, augmenting the main themes of the work with valuable new contributions.