For his second album following The Vineland Social Maturity Scale, Andrew Peterson, operating under the name the Kallikak Family, combines another assemblage of found sounds and odd bits of performed music into a sound collage. The aptly named “Organ Tuning/Surgery” leads things off with a constant drone. Then there are conversations heard at a distance, repeated singing voices, and simple notes played on keyboard instruments. “Guitar I” features finger-picked acoustic guitar. And so it goes. This sort of thing hasn’t changed much since John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Two Virgins was released in 1968. The press release accompanying the album states that “The record as a whole explores the meaning of specific days and locations in the life of one person, all leading up to May 23rd, 2007, the date on which a fortune teller predicted the artist’s death.” The listener can only hope the fortune teller was wrong and that Peterson outlives this prediction, but the meaning explored on the record must remain understandable only to him. – William Ruhlmann
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