Monocled Alchemist

(Warner Bros WS 1372) January 1968

That “Talk Talk” gang comes back with a bang.

The Bonniwell Music Machine | S/T | (Warner Bros) 1968 | Anyone who has ever watched the contemporary recording engineer at work with his bewildering jungle of knobs, switches, tape loops, flashing bulbs, and madly wavering dials might be inclined to believe that he was piloting a space ship rather than putting together a rock record.

Those joyous days when Glenn Miller and the entire twenty piece band used to aim their instruments in the general direction of the speaker horn are gone. And the enormous complexities of the recording studio have given us a sound much cleaner than those old Bluebird 78’s and perhaps much more sophisticated than the swing band. One difference is that the new electronic rock group is so . . . well, so mechanical . . . so machine-like. Sort of a music machine. Very much like Sean Bonniwell’s Music Machine.

The Bonniwell Music Machine is ideally named, in fact, for they have fallen heir to a treasure chest of electronic techniques pioneered by such ancestors as The Beatles and The Beach Boys, and are pushing farther out into the frontiers of studio-produced music.

The wild variations of electronic distortions, splicings, time lags, echoes, and dynamics control on this album are the most advanced products of sound engineering, recording, and mixing available. And the compositions Sean Bonniwell has composed are specially suited to the development of electronic enrichments by the Music Machine.

Vox amplification

After four months of preparation and 300 hours in the recording studio, some 14 works have come spilling out of the Machine, so revolutionary that they can hardly be contained on vinyl. Like most quality rock recordings, this creation by the Bonniwell Music Machine is originally recorded on eight channels and can be appreciated best on a good stereo phonograph. On one cut in particular, Vox Amplification Equipment manufacturers have designed an unusual playback amplification system specially for the Music Machine.

Utilizing this unique device with other advanced technology, “Me, Myself, and I,” the last composition on this album, may be a landmark in the music industry.

Lest you think that the Music Machine is merely a new form of Sonic Computer, the very significant human elements bear mention here, such as Sean Bonniwell himself. The young composer who penned “Talk Talk” has provided a mixture of emotional timbres on this album, including two recent national hit tunes, “Double Yellow Line” and “The Eagle Never Hunts The Fly.” On the composition of these fourteen tunes, Sean said this:

The Bonniwell Music Machine | S/T | (Warner Bros) 1968

“Dick Clark once asked me where the ideas for songs come from. I think that lyrics are opinions, and the musical melodies are either happily married to the words or are seeking an anullment. It seems to me that lyrics must logically come from the same place as opinions. The professors seem to think that there’s no such thing as an original opinion. Therefore, no such thing as an original song. So there really is no answer to Clark’s question. But I have one anyway.

“My songs are my children. Creativity is the closest a man comes to giving birth. His art spends nine months in pregnancy, twenty years in labour, and it doesn’t grow up until the man does. So the ideas for songs really come from the need to express yourself as a human being.”

Sean’s children are a noisy bunch all right, but they are clearly born of our time and of Sean’s musical generation. These amplifier tube babies have all the kicking energy of youth. So sit back and dig the sounds of an all-electric nursery full of newness and vitality by the Bonniwell Music Machine.

The importance of electronics to today’s sound is best demonstrated in this 14-cut album with the renamed Bonniwell Music Machine, now acknowledging Sean Bonniwell, who wrote all the material. This LP features the singles “Me, Myself, and I,” “Astrologically Incompatible,” “Bottom Of The Soul,” “Double Yellow Line,” and “The Eagle Never Hunts The Fly”. “Soul Love” is also topnotch. (Billboard)