Engaging with a Terre Thaemlitz record is a commitment. Though he started making ambient house records in the early 90s, latter-day Terre Thaemlitz music is not for the background. Well, you might get away with playing a record while you read one of his lengthy essays from the CD booklet, thus interfacing with Thaemlitz's ideas on two levels simultaneously. But in general his theory-driven work requires both heavy concentration and a certain amount of back-end reflection to be absorbed. There's nothing light about his intent, concept, tone or sonics.

Lovebomb is Thaemlitz' exploration of "love", and I use quotes because Thaemlitz is a skeptic. The tightly-spaced 32 pages of liner notes, which are written in both English and Japanese (Thaemlitz moved from the Bay Area to Tokyo) lay out in detail how, despite the spread of the West's version of "love," the meaning of the word still varies greatly from place to place, and indeed even within a single closed cultural system.

The essays that accompany the tracks provide the theoretical backing, but despite their liberal use of poststructuralist jargon, the meaning of the music is even less clear. This is a strange album. Having listened to it 15 times or more, I can hardly recall a thing about it once I slip it back into its case, and sometimes my memory doesn't even last that long. As Lovebomb is filled with odd pockets of silence ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes long, sometimes it's easy to forget that you're listening to music at all. The music seems designed to resist easy assimilation, and this is one of the more fragmented records I've heard. Tracks range from tiny snatches of sound to epics more than ten minutes long. There are plunderphonic cut-ups, noise, raw found recordings, ambient drones, delicate piano mediations...just as you're getting into one mode Thaemlitz he changes his pitch up, thus keeping you at arms length.

And yet, despite the pretension and the dense impenetrability, certain aspects of Lovebomb are so undeniably powerful that you have to give yourself over to Thaemlitz. First, there is "Between Empathy and Sympathy is Time (Apartheid)". On this track Thaemlitz takes an Apartheid-era militant speech from a member of South Africa's African National Congress and filters it through the music of Minnie Riperton's "Lovin' You". I mean "filters" literally here. The speech is run through a vocoder that varies along with the Riperton tune, so that the words of the speech-- about acquiring weapons, killing policemen, bombing factories-- are shaped the harmonic qualities of the song. It's a haunting and utterly unique effect, and the track is difficult to describe in terms of emotional complexity. It's somehow sad, frightening, confusing, inspiring and intellectually engaging all at the same time.

And then there are several places where Thaemlitz' genius for sonic texture and dynamics come through. The title track moves from almost inaudible silence to room-shaking, bassed-out distortion and back again over its 10 minutes, but it somehow manages to remain compelling and coherent as a composition. And "Sintesi Musicale del Linciaggio Futurista (Music Synthesis of Futurist Lynching)" provides an interesting contrast between its minimal Music For Airports-style piano and a mangled spoken word collage. And in running down Lovebomb's high points, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the gorgeous sleeve (drawings of a lynching and a scene from a subway terrorist attack are gussied up with scattered photographs of roses), which Thaemlitz illustrated and designed.

And somehow, some way, something about "love" is what ties all this together. It's difficult to understand the ideas at work without going back to the liner notes, but even the essays bring more questions than answers. In the CD booklet Thaemlitz offers, "Love, no matter how inexplicably mentally consuming, is not so much an emotion as an equation of contextually specific cultural variables." And elsewhere, "Love is...a redundant construction of pacifying hysteria, a mandatory insult to appease our senses." I'm not positive, but I think this is just a fancy way of saying:

I've had the blues
The reds and the pinks
One thing for sure
Love stinks