music review by Johnes Ruta, independent curator, AzothGallery.com

Bop Tweedie’s first album release is a professional sounding and technically well-produced musical experience which creates a colorful fabric. His tracks have the  sensation of being “songs” with no lyrics: a diverse range of jazzy layers of melodic and harmonic sounds.  

The first cut, “a crash course in crashing,” carries a medium up-tempo beat with a “Trance” melodic flow, the effect is mesmerizing. A second layer of musical melody then envelops us and draws  us down on a penetrating descent into psychic depths which remain navigable along extended lines of harmonic sounds.  This is great and sophisticated listening !

Tonal harmony appears to be the underlying structure of Tweedie’s music, where the strains also carry one off into the ether, but without the loss of one’s bearings. The musical tones work mostly in the positive major keys, starting and ending with feelings of exhilaration. The instinctual effect is that of birds in migration, flying far above the land by internal compass.

The second cut, “doe a dog”, generates a positive hypnosis with an array of strangely familiar voices: quiet conversations of incomprehensible words below the threshold of meaning.  The next cut “doesn’t the rain smell nice?” brings forth oscillating water-like waves of feeling; underscored with quiet laughing voices that are set to a dance beat.

“fee plus fie equals fo fum” builds a trance that rises up from beneath into a motive  energy flow with upbeat harmonic levels added.  “headphones plugged into nothing” carries a sweet Calypso island beat in a melodic progression.  In “i’d rather be famous,” quiet voices up rising from the depths are now layered over the buzz of an electrical current in the key of C, with the refrain “I’d rather be infamous!"  

In “march of the cicadas” as in “milk of wonder,” mating calls from insect antennae radio signals invoke hyperactive speed dancing. – Welcome to life and love in the cicada dimension!  In contrast, “the rise and fall of your chest when you are sleeping” then presents a sweet and sonorous relaxing piano melody.

There is a fine continuity of mood in Tweedie’s compositions in lessons perhaps learned from early electronic composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, and Pauline Oliveros.  But Tweedie significantly evolves beyond intellectual-sounding synthesized notes into a deeply emotive compendium. His patterns of voices, instruments, and electronics in  experimental jazz time-signature progressions like those of Dave Brubeck, Eric Dolphy, and Ornette Coleman, produce moods opening into a future-conscious dimension -- the kind  of future we hope for, rather than dystopia. -- Indeed, Tweedie’s titles, culminating with “think before you think” and “standing in a garden on a whim” propel this positive evolution, and trail us off into affirmative consciousness with a hypnotic back-beat…