Country Boy Country Dog

They Say...

Review by All Music Guide, All Music Guide

In a small Midwestern town, a natural mystery that's always been there is revealed. Using the procedural score "How To Discover Music In The Sounds of Your Daily Life" (1967), a rich variety of orchestral, electronic and natural sounds describe the interaction between mental events and the daily environment: the "inside" -- intuitive decision, spontaneous mental activity, feeling -- and the "outside" that make up reality. The score sets up an ecological chain in which natural sounds and voices are recorded and analyzed electronically (for hidden rhythmic codes, continuous melodic streams, harmonic attractions), and then electro-acoustical pieces are made from these analyses and played back into the environment. The five parts form an "audio-storyboard" (a movie soundtrack independent of a film): "A Dream Without Images" (before dawn, inside), "The CBCD Intro" (sunrise, outside), "Country Boy Country Dog" (midday, inside and out), "X Marks The Spot (Daydream)" (afternoon, inside), and "The CBCD Variations for Soloist and Orchestra" (twilight, outside). "Like any true artist, however, Tyranny reaches for the heart, not only the mind, through the tender and solemn hymn of 'The CBCD Intro' with its grand recurring motif, and the delightful 'CBCD Variation' for soloist and orchestra, one of the crowning achievements of his career...the schizophrenic babble of our lives becomes order and beauty...to these ears the electro-acoustic pieces rank among the more developed and seductive music that Tyranny has composed." (Piero Scaruffi, i/e No. 7)