Turkey Shoot

Rick Wakeman
The Art in Music Trilogy
(Music Fusion import)

You thought he'd died and gone to his reward, and so did the All-Music Guide, where his timeline ends in the '80s. But his discography tells a different tale: easily the most prolific "rock" artist of the '90s, manufacturing "instrumental new world ambient music" and God knows what else at a staggering clip. Night Airs, Aspirant Sunrise, Aspirant Sunset, Black Knights in the Court of Ferdinand IV, Phantom Power, Softsword: King John and the Magna Charter[sic], A World of Wisdom,and 2000 A.D. Into the Future get us only to the end of 1991, and he's kept it up—by my count, 35 albums in the decade, including this recent set, all three discs of which I swear I listened to while awake. Suffused with the twixt-strings-and-keyboard echoes that are the special curse of synthesizers on today's auriculum, these brief pieces favor harpsichord over piano and will dabble in anything a synth can, including drums and voices. The first disc, "The Sculptor," is the most soporific, which isn't a dis—"The Writer" gave me insomnia, and not because I blamed myself. D