Sandra Cross – The MMs Bar Recordings – Trunk – JBH040CD ***

Making weekly London to Leicester rail journeys, Sandra Cross secretly taped hundreds of buffet announcements, and edited them into this thirty minute piece. Focusing tightly on the small, and usually unvarying, list of fayre generates a maddeningly mundane musicality. Seven minutes in the unprecedented non-availability of hot drinks suddenly seems catastrophic.

Different announcements, with vastly different emphasis and emotional resonances, can sound indefatigably enthusiastic about the quavers/ water combos, or audibly defeated. Marking the announcements as individual tracks might have offered the listener infinite random variations, but it seems fitting that we endure this album as the artist intended.

(17/7/11)