Sound Projector reviews Left Cincinnati

http://www.thesoundprojector.com/2010/05/01/memory-cold-and-raw/

Left Cincinnatti (JOE FRAWLEY MUSIC JFM-CD08) is the new release from Joe Frawley, the Connecticut pianist and sound-collagist. Continuing preoccupations manifested most strongly on his last release Emperor Of Daffodils, this release is full of voices, taken from a variety of sources – cut-up voices, prepared texts read by actresses, sounds sourced from YouTube and dialect recordings, and so forth. Along with the shimmering and stirring electronic music, tape workings and nostalgic piano work, Frawley once again tells stories, building his fragmented and overlaid narratives out of fleeting moments, impressions and traces. For what it’s worth, I seem to hear at least one narrative thread on here that is full of the sadness of a wasted life, thwarted ambitions and the tedium of a compromised job. The career girl who didn’t like high school ends up working as a secretary in a soulless bureaucratic establishment, where the very ring of a telephone strikes a chord of existential despair. As is customary, all of this is woven together with Frawley’s characteristic dream-like and ambiguous soft-focus manner, leaving a very open-ended yet incredibly dense text for the listener to revisit. Despair and loneliness are kept at arm’s length via rich and beautiful art.