“Stone makes music that can hit your ear holes like a DMT flash.”
– Richard Gehr, Relix 2019
Wat Dong Moon Lek is Stone’s latest distinctive, characterful and playful take on sound collage, a followup equal to 2020’s thrilling Stolen Car…There is an infinite quality to the work…much alchemy here, each track feeling fizzy and alive with potential directions. There are so many moments that make me want to dance, or stand up and applaud. It’s clever, effervescent and gloriously fun. – The Wire, June 2022 issue
“Carl Stone is a master of sound deconstruction managing to reinvent the destiny of a song, such as creating new sounds.”
– Guillermo Escudero, LOOP MAGAZINE
“Wat Dong Moon Lek” sees Carl Stone exploring the world of Max/MSP driven composition over the course of seven pieces and a total runtime of roughly 37 minutes, starting from a point of densely layered, extremely Cut-Up driven superchromatic HyperPop with the albums opener “Rikido”, drifting further into a sphere of slightly washed out and diffuse SinoSkweee with “Longo” before “Korzo” presents a highly fragmented take on somewhat cheesy Jazz and choir infused Pop which evokes memories of rapidly decaying CD-r copies dug up from the archives after 20+ years of improper storage. With “Mozell’s” Carl Stone presents a more romantic and accessible, yet still rather abstract variation of what could be 50s-leaning AvantgardeJazz whilst the title cut that is “Wat Dong Moon Lek” offers a trip even further down the timeline with its harmonic vintage voice layers whereas “Apsara” weighs in eerily unnerving, quivering frequency workouts alongside indifferent pseudo-percussive shifts and otherwise messy loop (not loop) business for the higly headstrong and the concluding “Jangara” comes at us with more of a Punk / Hardcore-leaning intensity despite seemingly being rooted in fully deconstructed samples of some kind of SouthEast Asian traditional music. Recommended for a reason.
– Baze.DJUNKIII, NITESTYLEZ.DE
“Many people equate laptop music with dull. On stage, that might be true, but there is the musical result that counts. Very few people who use a laptop cook up such strange music as Carl Stone. To say ‘music that defies description’ is always easy said, but I believe this is very much true for the current album of Carl Stone. Almost 70 years old, with a long career in electronic music (since the early 70s), he composes very fresh music these days. Fresh and weird. Stones uses Max/MSP software and what goes into the machine is hard to describe. The man divides his time between Japan and the USA, so I am inclined to think in goes some (many?) examples of Japanese popular music. These sounds are cut up into tiny segments, shuffled around and cooked up for a new dish. Ah, Oval! No, it’s not like Oval, even when the basic idea is the same. In some strange way, it seems as if all the elements Stone uses are from one song, and he’s re-arranging these. It may vaguely resemble the original. Or does it? That’s the tricky
thing here and something I found highly fascinating. Is this an easy cut-up job, re-aligning some elements, and that’s it? Somehow that is not the case, I think. There is a familiarity with the music that connects to the world of pop music in my brain, and yet none of this is really pop. There is no hook you are latch onto or sing along to. Not that there are many vocals, but when they are, they are impossible to sing along to. It is a bit of everything and anything (all at once?). I find this fascinating stuff, and Stone has something unique going on here. I can imagine at a very loud volume, and this music will be even better. Party music or sound art? The judges are not out on this yet, but I love it.”
– Frans de Waard, VITAL WEEKLY
Photo: Joe Elliot Purtell