Big Blue Ball - s/t
peter gabriel’s big blue ball (snicker) project has been in the works for some 15 years now. the long-awaited album is a collaborative effort between dozens of musicians working to create an amalgamation of sounds from all over the world, with gabriel contributing to four of the eleven songs featured. those tracks make this album sound more like a lost album of his than a collaborative work, which isn’t helped by gabriel’s trademark slick production styles (and perhaps this reflects more of my own biases toward how i think world music should sound) that tend to remove much of the music from any sort of context. simultaneously, the production helps make things more cohesive, and the album sounds really good given that one of the major setbacks of this project was the fact that many of the tapes were in a kind of “mess.“ given the 15 year gestation period for this album, it sounds surprisingly modern, and although not all the songs are winners, the juxtapositions of styles and cultures proves to be interesting and rewarding.
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