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In the mid-1970s, Hans Fenger taught music in the Langley, British Columbia, school district, using an experimental method inspired equally by Brian Wilson and Carl Orff. Occasionally he would record his students in the school gymnasium--elaborate affairs involving more than 60 kids per session. The result is this compelling collection of semi-accidental genius. Picture the Shaggs and Danielson presiding over an elementary school assembly for shy kids, and you begin to understand how sweet, sincere, and slightly unsettling these recordings are. The Langley students perform their favorite 1960s and 1970s hits as if they never heard the originals; they turn "Mandy" into the kind of lo-fi pop song that Neutral Milk Hotel would perfect 20 years later, and sing "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" like a delegation of extraterrestrial children on a friendship mission to Earth. Fenger's arrangements are spacious but elaborate, with prominent Orff percussion instruments that coat everything with a glimmering otherworldliness. The Langley students must've been proud just to hear themselves on tape, but for those of us encountering these artifacts for the first time, it's impossible to come away unmoved. (The photographs are precious, too.)
--Mike Appelstein
Album Details
Originally waxed for friends and families of a rural Canadian elementary/middle-school chorus, these mid-70s vanity recordings capture the joy, confusion, discovery and loneliness of childhood like few before. The production's serendipitous journey from thrift store to non-commercial radio to public release fully preserves the original lack of premeditation, and further highlights the distance these performances kept from any taint of commercial calculation. The sugarcoated cuteness one might reflexively expect from a children's music project is entirely absent. Rookie teacher Hans Fenger wedded elements of Carl Orff's pioneering music curriculum with contemporary hit songs, to forge an inventive, safe space for his young performers. The occasional rhythmic wobble or flubbed note is subsumed by the children's unbridled expressiveness and modulated by the Spectorian gymnasium acoustics. No one associated with
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