This RTV episode features Toby Driver and his band Tartar Lamb II performs their 2010 four-movement suite, “Polyimage of Known Exits.”
“Polyimage of Known Exits” is a terrifying take on euthanasia and regret. It features heavy electric bass, piles of delay pedals, brutal noise, processed woodwinds, demented melodies, and haunted vocals in glacial freefall around the galactic moebius of Kronos. Following this, Driver and the members of Tartar Lamb will premiere new material in a similar vein.
Toby Driver: composer – pure evil electric bass and vocals
Jeremiah Cymerman: extended clarinet and electronics
Terran Olson and Dan Means: the sighing alto sax duet
Tim Byrnes: pure good trumpet, dubious synths, and flugelhorn
+ Special guests!
Performance date: 10/20/2010
Episode release date: 01/14/2011
Tartar Lamb is an avant-electroacoustic band hailing from New York City, led by a composer, Toby Driver, who has performed and recorded with contemporary geniuses such as Trey Spruance (Secret Chiefs 3, Mr. Bungle), G. Stuart Dahlquist (Burning Witch, ASVA), and Randall Dunn (Sunn0)), Master Musicians of Bukkake). Their hallucinatory music has its roots in doom-goth, progressive rock, and new age, and has combined these influences with their experiences in the modern classical and avant-jazz worlds of downtown New York to create a completely unique, complex, heartbreaking, and meticulously composed genreless sound all their own. Tartar Lamb’s music is characterized by its specific use of modular repetitive forms – small musical phrases that are repeated and stretched and shrunk in time, with non-repetitive melodies swirling about. Clarinet deconstructionist, Jeremiah Cymerman, provides the percussion by way of his extended clarinet techniques and electronic processing. Tartar Lamb’s music is hyper-elaborate, horrifying ambient music, whose every moment is filled with information, while it washes over and envelops the listener in constant atmosphere like a whale swallowing a comet, slicing up your face with the shards of ice it belches from its bloody blow-hole.