A Guide To The Music Of The 21st Century in Leonardo July

A Guide To The Music Of The 21st Century

by Perfect Vacuum
Acidsoxx Musicks, Sante Fe, NM, 2009
CD $9.98
Distributor’s website: http://www.acidsoxx.com.

Reviewed by Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome (Italy)
Professor of Economics Università Europea di Roma

giuseppe.pennisi@gmail.com

The title of the record is deceiving. The reader would think either an anthology of new post-dodecaphonic tendencies: minimalism, electro acoustics, even neo-romantics or of an update of Benjamin Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. We get neither of one of those or anything in between. It is, rather, a selection of easy listening music by a Dutch Group, the type of music one would listen to when driving Interstate Highway 66, on the Deutsche Autobahn or on the Italian Autostrada del Sole. It is meant help the listener avoid falling to sleep; there is quite a rhythm and more than a fair dose of noise. It is worth listening to a couple of them and offering the CD as a gift to a teenager.