Reviewed by Woodruff Laputka
The Music of Burton Wagner, an inspiring project from the South Eastern United States, in an inspiring trek through the personal interpretations of both experience and interest by one, Burton Wagner. Providing an introductory album, titled “In the realms of the Unreal”, Wagner brings us into a strange, melodic world of the mind of Henry Darger, eccentric painter and writer who composed an estimated 50,000 page novel before his death.
The Album, named after a highly abbreviated title of Dargers novel, begins with a man walking into a room and shutting his door. His keys begin to jingle just as the brim between reality and fiction is passed, taking us deep into a place of Wagner’s interpretation from Dargers most strange and unusual fantasy, where countries are at war beneath the swell of storm and fear, and beauty lays in innocence, pure, against the wills of zeal and ignorance.
Wagner’s beautiful acoustics and noise-affect generated sound-scapes offer a unique and imaginatively fertile look into the capability (as the reviewer has seen ,first hand, the primitive resources involved in the making of this music) of one with so little at hand. Yet, still is there achieved an atmosphere of Beauty, Harmony, Havoc and Woe, as if the children of Dargers novel were speaking to us, if only briefly.
The Eldritch Gazette, July 2006
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