Science Group Mere Coincidence CD

Personnel: Bob Drake (vocals, guitar, bass, drums); Amy Denio (vocals); Stevan Tickmayer (guitar, violin, zither, piano, keyboards, samples); Fred Frith (guitar); Claudio Puntin (clarinet, bass clarinet); Chris Cutler (drums).
Recorded between May 1997 & January 1999 at Studio Midi Pyrenees, Caudeval, France.
The Science Group's A Mere Coincidence demonstrates the potential diversity of avant-garde music as well as some of its weaknesses. The album begins aggressively with "Mnemonic," a song that moves rapidly from deep, driving piano riffs to female vocals with the occasional moment of sheer terrific distortion thrown in. In contrast, track three starts out sounding more like the detached bleeping and blurting of Nobukazu Takemura, but consolidates around Amy Denio's high, haunting vocals and repetition of lyrics like "a trace of DNA/a filament so fine." Those type of high-minded lyrics are evident throughout the song titles and liner notes and serve to make A Mere Coincidence's pseudo-scientific theme more cohesive in the absence of strong musical similarities between songs. The end result, however, is somewhat hollow music that sounds like it might have been written to accompany a modern theater piece. As die-hard experimentalists, the Science Group themselves probably wouldn't object to this characterization, claiming that they are only encouraging the listeners to fill in the music's considerable gaps with their own imagination. ~ Nathan Thornburgh
This album is the result of something of an avant-rock "supergroup"; yet unlike most "regular" supergroups (where egos clash and promise is unfulfilled), the Science Group confounds expectations. The group consists of ex-Henry Cow/Art Bears members Fred Frith and Chris Cutler, ex-Tone Dogs/Pale Nudes singer Amy Denio, Bob Drake, clarinetist Claudio Puntin, and multi-instrumentalist Stevan Tickmayer, each of whom has made music that's difficult (if not impossible!) to categorize. A MERE COINCIDENCE features Denio's whimsical soprano singing Cutler's paradoxical lyrics to music that's equal parts King Crimson, Igor Stravinsky, pre-1974 Frank Zappa, the Boredoms and Kurt Weill. There's a great deal of variety here: the fractured, XTC-like pop of "Parity"; the shimmering, stark electronic textures-with-classical-sounding acoustic guitar of "Engineering"; the daffy sound-collage of "There Must Be Something." Tired of predictable music? The Science Group will keep tossing you aural curve-balls--just when you think they settle into a mode or groove, they jump into the Twilight Zone and take you with them on a truly magical carpet ride.The Wire (1/00, pp.88,90) - "...explores/explodes songform with a tortuous, multilayered harmonic and rhythmic intensity that few could even dream of, let alone execute....This substantial work demands repeat hearings..."
Mojo (Publisher) (5/00, p.98) - "...A coherent and important piece of work, and not without a sense of humor itself....[Chris] Cutler's lyrics...grapple with some fairly intractable scientific and philosophical ideas....Modern classical composer Stevan Tickmayer has set them to music....As school textbooks say - Physics Is Fun."