There is a chilling, lengthy interpretation of the myth of Daphne and Apollo, in an ever-changing time signature. In the twist, “Barstow – Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions From A Highway Railing At Barstow, California” rambles for 10 minutes, its instruments sounding like huge motorized Slinkys gunning their engines and looking for adventure, while the men seem to yodel and scat and highlight personal messages that Parts found scrawled on the side of the road in his transient years.
The final track is perhaps the album's most demanding: The 16-minute “Castor & Pollux – A Dance for the Twin Rhythms of Gemini from Plectra & Percussion Dances” incorporates what might strike American ears as sonic Chinoiserie, with drums and bells and strings play little duets with each other, one playing rhythm and the other playing melody – now, switch. The music may be exotic, but it's definitely not exotic. At times, he might make one think of a Looney Tunes character tapping his toes or shuffling his feet, but Partch was dead serious, if not mindless. The songs didn't seem to care if you listened to them or not, but if you did, they would reveal what you can find when you follow your muse beyond all rhyme and reason: a world of shimmering echoes, decadent and punk in its own right , born of spiritual sweat and ostentatious rigor.
Partch was born in 1901 to a couple of Christian missionaries who had just returned to the United States from China and soon settled in the remote Arizona desert, driven there by his father's new job with the federal immigration department and his mother's tuberculosis, which climate helped to mitigate. In his 1949 book that explained his musical theories and the instruments he called Genesis of a music, he recalled that “my earliest and most painful auditory memories are the whistles of the trains running through this valley, from one mountain range to the opposite.” From the beginning, his world was an instrument.
The family moved to Phoenix and then to Albuquerque. The young Parts gave himself an informal education in world music through Edison reel-to-reel recordings: “Jewish chants, Chinese theater and Congolese ritual,” he later recalled. As a teenager, he found work playing mechanical instruments during silent films and another job delivering prescriptions on his bicycle, with many orders going to sex workers in Albuquerque's red-light district, who became his friends. He soon began composing for the piano. He also realized he was gay. After his father died three months before he graduated from high school, Partch moved to Los Angeles and began studying at the University of Southern California School of Music, his faith in European classical music boring him. A year after his arrival, his mother came to see him and was killed by a troll.
