V/Vm - Dimitri Shostakovich - The Missing Symphony

Unyielding experimenters of music who relentlessly probe all boundaries of taste and quality, V/vm deftly illustrate it with this release. For Dimitri Shostakovich: The Missing Symphony, each of Shostakovich's 15 symphonies were digitally processed (either compressed or expanded) in order to make them last as long as the average of all of them (roughly 47 minutes), then played synchronously and released as such. Surprisingly, the result isn't nearly as chaotic as it would seem (though it actually sounds as though no more than five or six are running at once), and it appears that Shostakovich had a bit of a pattern: the separate symphonies occasionally peak at similar times, creating a cacophony that sounds like a hall full of musicians tuning up with little thought of what their compatriots are playing. Read More