MOTHER OF BALLOON

"For those with a sensitivity to sounds such as the scraping of a blackboard with chalk, or of pulling at the outside skin of a balloon with the palm of one's hand, Judy Dunaway's Mother of Balloon Music on Innova will be like a prescription for a migraine headache -- not for the medicine, but for the headache. Initially inspired by a whimsical 1972 effort by Anthony Braxton entitled "Composition 25," which calls for 250 balloons, composer Dunaway has taken the lowly party favor and created an entire musical aesthetic around it. Dunaway applies a much wider range of performance applications to the balloon than most would even conceive, such as using balloons in place of the bridges of a koto, or in chamber music combinations. Through tape recording, digital sampling, and the use of enormously large balloons, Dunaway seems to have conquered the short decay time of a balloon, although she does not try to overcome its unpredictability in terms of pitch and randomness of output. Unlike Gershon Kingsley, who once demonstrated to concert entrepreneur Sol Hurok the musical viability of an early synthesizer by playing "Mein Yiddische Mama" on it..." http://shop.vh1.com