Best Whatever it Is
There Were One and It was Two: Annotated Artifacts from the Doubles Museum, by Ric Royer
Nothing is ever what it appears to be in the performance art of Ric Royer. An expert in using a casual observation to turn an otherwise quotidian anecdote into a rabbit-hole digression into the uncanny, Royer applied his curiously perceptive mind to the genuinely odd for his Narrow House recording debut: the idea of doubling as it appears in both intellectual history and nature. And what he concocts is one of the most unusual artifacts to come out of Baltimore--no stranger to the outlandish--in some time. Part faux lecture performance, part experimental text, part spoken-word recording, and part experiential sound art (thanks to the sax noises of John Berndt on the CD), There Was One and It Was Two is and isn't a sound recording of a performance event, is and isn't an aural accompaniment to written text, is and isn't a visual artifact of a wild-hair idea. It's all of these and none of them, and somehow still manages to hold the attention throughout its meandering ride.
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