I just listen to Liverpool Sound Collage for the first time today.

I was highly skeptical prior to listening it especially after your reference in discord and rhyme and your review whether you were questioning whether it is music and comparison with Revolution No. 9. The idea of an album of sound collage/music concrete seems to be an inherently bad idea (i consider it as part of the 20th century classical music committing suicide)

However I think there is one thing that needs to be emphasise about this album is that it isn't purely a music concrete album.

It's a music concrete synthesised with techno or the backbeat/percussive elements of rock music. It's music concrete album you can head bang, tap your feet or even dance to. 80% of the album have a clear delineated pulse, beat either supplied by percussion, bass, electronics, or loops of sounds

Now as someone who doesn't particularly like techno or music concrete. I hate revolution no. 9 and I think Paul McCartney's techno Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest to be one of the worst album ever made (it's a toss up between that album and Trout Mask Replica).

However when you combine those two elements together, you actually create something better than the sum of its parts.

THe problem with Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest is that it's repetitive, lack any dramatic shifts/dynamic change, harmonic change etc and the album is one continuous pulse and boring to listen to.

The problem with music concrete is a lack of traditional music elements to latch on.

Combining these two together actually partly fixes the problems with both genre.

Techno elements allows the music concrete piece to have a music foundation to all the sound collage as you have a easily perceived rhythm.

The music concrete elements adds a hell of a lot of interesting effects, variations, drama to what could have been a repetitive boring pulse. The music is never boring to listen to. You have a section of music where you have a pulse with forever changing sound effects on top of that and often this will lead to another section of music with a different instrument/element that forms a pulse. The music is always continually transformative.

Also there is a sense of departure and return with Peter Blake 2000 where there is Free Now element that occurs periodically like a refrain.

The question of whether this is music or not is actually kind of confusing to me. I do get why people questions certain avantgarde genre to be whether this is music or not and I do find that to be a legitimate question but I don't get the questioning of this album.

If you are the type of person who considers foundation of music to be rhythm and that rhythm itself allows to be classified as music. Then this album is clearly music. It's only not music if you think rhythm itself needs to be combined with other element but even then you can hear melodic riffs (such as bass riffs) in this album. If you don't consider this album music, I find it difficult for the same people to consider minimalistic rap album (so rapping over a drum beat with no supporting melodic instrument) to be considered music while being internally consistent. If you find the idea of people questioning whether rap is "music" to be silly (or these days the accusation of racism) because rap music has rhythm, then this album clearly qualifies as music.

The highlight of the album is when they used the clip of George Harrison in the studio and then he says "do what you want to do" and this is then looped into a pulse and then this became pitch shifted to lower and lower pitch and then bass line overlies the loop and this spoken loop became transform into a repeating bass riff and drums kicking in. I thought that was very very creative looping of sound there and on top of that there is clear music element of a pulse to wrap your head around.

(first time i heard this I thought Paul McCartney was looping the Let It Be dispute and laughed at the novelty of that but it turns out that wasn't hte clip)

I can't say this is a good album because it's still a techno-music concrete album. However this is far better than I expected and it was an interesting listen and I consider it as the most successful experiment you can get within the limitation of the genre.

I'll give it a Hex 7 or 9/15 and I recommend people to give it a single listen