On 20 June the Improvised Music Company (IMC) is hosting an intimate launch event to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Roger Doyle's monumental work "Babel".
"Babel" is no ordinary album. It's a sprawling musical journey that took Doyle a decade to compose. Originally released in 1999 as a 5-CD set, it boasts over 100 individual pieces and involved nearly 50 collaborators.
For this special anniversary, Doyle has revisited "Babel," remastering it and presenting it for the first time on vinyl. The new edition condenses the original 6 hours of music into a more manageable 80-minutes spread across two high-quality 180gm LPs. The package also includes extensive liner notes and a download code for the full 6-hour experience.
The seeds of "Babel" were sown in the early 1980s while Doyle was involved in experimental theatre. Working with emerging technologies and across a variety of genres he realised that he would be unlikely to achieve an overarching compositional style. Instead deciding to make a virtue out of the fact that he composed so schizophrenically, he wished to create a musical alphabet out of short abstract sounds with these sounds being analogous to phonemes in speech. With Blade Runner and sci-fi embedded in the zeitgeist of the times he came to the idea of the Tower of Babel as both a futuristic skyscraper and also an embodiment of language.
In the spring of 1990 "Babel" was finally begun and kept growing until it reached over 6 hours of music and was released in 1999 as a large-scale musical structure making use of many technologies and music languages, with each piece of music being thought of as a 'room' or place within an enormous tower city. Doyle’s "Babel" celebrates language - a slight variation on the Biblical morality tale and musical expression in all its variety.