Peter Gordon / David Cunningham – The Yellow Box

If one were to test the more than 40-year-old music on The Yellow Box for affinities with today’s (pop) avant-garde, the result would likely fill a small book. The 17 musical miniatures recorded between 1981 and 1983 by David Cunningham and Peter Gordon brush up against almost everything from Ambient and free – or fake – jazz to proto techno and contemporary classical music. Cunningham, the British mind behind The Flying Lizards – a project that improbably landed a UK Top 10 hit in the late 1970s – and a producer for This Heat and Palais Schaumburg, meets Gordon, a New Yorker for whom no music between disco and the avant-garde is foreign territory.

This dream pairing of experimental music processes and manipulates pre-prepared tape loops in real time, shaping them into concise, perfectly proportioned pieces. Bassist John Greaves (Henry Cow) and drummer Anton Fier (The Feelies, The Lounge Lizards) are also involved. The Yellow Box speaks not only to the timelessness and enduring inspirational force of experimental music, but also to the idea that sketches can sometimes be more effective than the finished picture – an insight that would only fully take hold in the 2000s through artists such as Dean Blunt.