The virtuous string player Eugene Chadbourne and the ingenious synthesizer player Thomas Lehn met in the summer of 1999 to celebrate an impossible event: the confrontation of a banjo with an analogue EMS-Synthesizer... Both know well, as if dreaming, how to move between material extension and its demolition in the best tradition of European improvised music and country songs, as only Chadbourne can recite them. As if they had never done anything else...
It doesn't matter if they weave dense interactions and lump them into great noise or consciously go separate ways and seem to play without the other-their exchange is always direct, constantly the other knows the right answer. Spontaneous improvisation in full completion: c inside actually documents the first meeting of these master musicians.

 Reviews of C inside

 Thomas Lehn (also on GROB102, GROB206/7, GROB323, GROB537, GROB654)

Eugene Chadbourne (also on GROB009, GROB321)

  back to GROB catalog

GROB206/7 MIMEO - Electric Chair + Table 

EUGENE CHADBOURNE & THOMAS LEHN - C INSIDE (CD by Grob)
Chadbourne is one of the nicest people I know, and also one of the funniest. I remember seeing him live on a sunday afternoon red wine soaked concert at the local student club with the right attitude where he played the rake. Also his appearance with Jon Rose on my radioprogram brings back a smile on my face. I still see Chadbourne many times a year when he tries to sell me his self-burned CD-R and real CD's. A body of work which meets easily that of Merzbow. Recorded on the same night as the G7 summit, so Chadbourne raves in the liner notes (which are more or less standard features on the Grob releases - bravo!) how he hates that, and proclaim total freedom. Total freedom is also what he and Thomas Lehn are about when playing music. Lehn plays the EMS A Synthi and Chadbourne on a series of instruments with strings with various objects and his voice. Highlight here is the cover 'Hickory Wind' (original by Gram Parsons), played and sung in a very free manner by Chadbourne and a reduced Lehn participation. Before and after that wild improvs, but this song is kinda traditional but still weird enough. It shows to people: "hey we do improv, but we can do a good tune too, you know". Excellent stuff.
Frans de Waard (Vital Weekly 14.09.2000)

back to top