Music Reviews

John Latartara

Penetrations: Sonic Explorations in Sexuality

Sachimay

I asked for this disc, and I figured I couldn’t lose, right? Hell, in 78 minutes and 28 seconds of music about sex, there has to be something good for the Hankster. Hardly anyone does just plain flat-out sex stuff on records anymore, and this guy is a classy neoclassical guitar guy, so maybe this would be the aural version of that classy girl-on-girl stuff made by real live women. I had high hopes.

All of which were cruelly dashed. The first track is called “The Perverse Implantation” – that kind of sounds like science-fiction porn stuff, right? Well, the only perverse implantation there was a lot of shrieking noise right in my ear. There are a few “Interlude” tracks here and there where people talk about sex, and a few instrumentals that are either elevator-drone, like “Touch Through,” or boring New Age crap, like “Chateau La Coste.”

The big hitter here is “Hitotose,” which takes 33 minutes to detail Latartara getting a humma from a prostitute. Forget the crummy fake-Tibet background music for a second – why’d he have to mix the voices and sounds so far down? Why just a blowjob? And do we really wanna hear him ask her to slap his balls? Now add the crummy fake-Tibet music back in. Eeesh.

“Ripe” is supposed to be a 15-year-old girl talking about sex; in 12 minutes, her voice is audible for about maybe two minutes and the rest is that kind of classical music that no one likes. And what should be the best thing on here, the phone-sex monologue with soundtrack called “Simone’s Confession,” is just bad phone sex. You just know she’s watching Jerry Springer while she’s doing this, and I’m sorry, I’d rather listen to something sexy, like… damn, like anything else in the world.

Sachimay Records: http://www.sachimayrecords.com


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