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Keir Cooper + Eleanor Westbrook — Star Quality - Speculations for Guitar and Voice
(Discus Music 179CD, 2024, CD / DL)

by Henry Schneider, Published 2024-12-14

Star Quality - Speculations for Guitar and Voice is an attempt by guitarist Keir Cooper and soprano Eleanor Westbrook to take the power of her voice, the grandeur of opera, and electric guitar to create a "conversation." The ten compositions on this album use various applications of crude technology (digitally-generated voice, autotune, micro-sampling, reverb levels etc), to push this duet to extreme sonic places. Each track offers a different perspective on the capabilities of guitar and voice, making them rub and contradict and fuse and blend. The composing process begins with Eleanor’s vocal improvisations that she hands over to Keir to be freely manipulated and composed against. And after the opening track “Willow Tree,” a revision of an English traditional song, the album contains no words. An intriguing premise, but the results are something else entirely as the album plummets downhill after “Willow Tree.” Star Quality is 45 minutes of self-indulgent uninspired and unlistenable drek as they seem to be only entertaining themselves. The tracks are too long, even at three to six minutes, Keir seems to be searching for something in the midst of this sonic chaos while he just noodles away on his guitar, which at times almost gels into a coherent guitar line.  And Eleanor’s vocals are sometimes so shrill that they could scrape paint off a wall, which could be the result of Keir’s manipulations, a very bad choice. Who would even listen to this set of sonic events in time and space, a very loose definition of music, for enjoyment or even inspiration? There is no redeeming value to this pretentious attempt at an academic experiment that would have been better off left in a bin for the garbage collectors.

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Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): Keir Cooper + Eleanor Westbrook

More info
http://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/star-quality-speculations-for-guitar-and-voice-179cd-2024

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