When I was seven years old, I received a rather exciting Christmaspresent, or at least it was exciting to me at that young age. It was aYamaha PSR-6 keyboard, with 99 special effect voices (including theever popular 'Machine Gun' and 'Ocean Wave') and 16 different styles ofbeat! Imagine the possibilities that were available to me, the things Icould do with so many features and options. It was an orchestra in abulky black casing, just awaiting the twitch of my conductor's baton.In reality, my seven-year-old virtuosity was capable only of hitting'Samba' and then goofing around with the funny noises. I am reminded ofthis warm childhood memory because Cut Out's "Interlude with FunMachine" sounds to me like it was put together by a group of seven yearolds with PSR-6's. Had I only known then that I could have recordedmyself (with that little thirty-second memory button?) and put out analbum. It honestly sounds, to my ears, as if every loop, beat, andvoice was drawn from this device and then sprinkled with a littlestudio work. The album's opener, "At It Again" goes on for five minuteswith only five seconds worth of music. "The Power Brokers" is theclosest to breaking from the unfortunate Yamaha sound, with drippyeffects, original beats and a bright organ loop that does not overstayits welcome. The track is relatively and thankfully brief. "Theme FromFun Machine, Part I," however, is an exercise in endurance, clocking inas the longest song on the album, though not by much. It's ten minutesand nineteen seconds of the 'March' beat with a rising and falling tonethat sounds like an advanced slide whistle synthesizer. I just keptthinking to myself, 'What could justify ten minutes of this?' In ashorter context, the ideas that Cut Out had for this piece may haveworked, however throughout the long (long) course of "Fun Machine,"they are repeated until your mind becomes desensitized to the audiowavelengths and you forget you're listening to anything at all. Thefinal song, "Fin" does come across well, with a mournful organ thatdrones on darkly, actually managing to evoke a mood or a feeling ratherthan just looping a tinny beat. Its ending is abrupt, but keeping itshort and knowing when to get out is a virtue that would have improvedthe rest of this disc immensely. "Interlude with Fun Machine" suffersfrom a dearth of ideas, and lacks sufficient style to hide that fact.Did they take the name Cut Out as an allusion to the cut out bin? Ihave a suggestion. If you're of a certain age range, chances are thatyou too received a PSR-6, popular among budding grade school musicians,at some point in your childhood. If it happens to be kicking aroundyour basement somewhere, I suggest you dig it out, dust it off, and hitthe 'demonstration' button. That song was always a lot of fun. It waslong, but at least it had variations. Read More
