The answering machine beeps, the telephone rings, the operator’s voice blends in, then more operators tell you to dial again, and suddenly you get the feeling of “On the Beach”, that 1960’s movie dealing with the crew on a sub who turned out to be the sole survivors after a nuclear war. They hear some beeping sounds, but that is discovered to be an automatic transmission, no live humans involved.

There are six tracks spread out across this CD called "With(In)communicado", numbered #1 to #6, which all draw their sounds from the answering machine of David Dvorin during September 1996. This is a nice, though not untraveled, path, and Dvorin utilizes the sonic pollution of every man’s gizmos well, giving it a new context, a new meaning, much in the way that artists like Andy Warhol and his followers put everyday commonplace products on display in the art galleries, or the way Marcel Duchamp used “ready-mades”. You would think that this concept be out-dated by now, but no, it works fine here. Every third or so decade older styles pop up again too, in partly new contexts, as technology evolves. The concept of success in these domains always lye in the compositional skill of the composer. This is very important. Just because you have a Macintosh G4 with twin processors at your hand, you’re not an electroacoustic wizard. We see to many examples of this; people mistaking the pen for the novel. In this case, though, I think it works quite good, even though I, from years and years of listening to electroacoustics and modern music, get a little demanding as to the results of the experimentation.

Between these gizmo tales Dvorin puts other musical pieces, duly altered, electronically - except for some purely acoustical tracks that remain pristine and untouched. Track #2, for example – “Swelled Head” – uses backward-recorded harmonies from a bowed psaltery with looping electric guitar fragments. The psaltery was prepared with objects like paper clips etcetera.

Track #7 - "Rain" - at first reminds me a lot of Brian Eno's "Discreet Music".

On the whole this is a nice example of the workings of an experimental American composer of today.