I've had a love/hate relationship with Bill's productions (and playing) for years. When I first heard him in the mid 80's I was an instant fan. He's produced some of my favorite records ever - Sonny Sharrock's "Ask The Ages" is pure genius - one of the best capturings of a rare recent moment of actual jazz magic I can think of. The Golden Palomino's self title first record, Material's "Memory Serves", Jonas Hellborg's "The Word", Last Exit's "Iron Path", even the controversial "remixes" of the Miles 69-74 stuff - has all been highly inspired and incredibly well executed.
However over time with Bill's amazing prolificness has also come a lot of cookie cutter productions and repeated ideas - a lot of it just fairly mediocre meanderings.
His views on (and remixes of) Fela Kuti are absolutely abhorrent to me in that he obviously is completely blind to the genius of what I consider one of the greatest composers of the 20th century whose music has gotten stronger to me on every repeated listening while a lot of Bill's music gets weaker as I dig deeper into it.
Still - Laswell's pretty much always stayed true to himself, has done some outstanding work of more than a few true gems, and every record he's worked on does indeed engineering wise sound great.
anyway -
Ryan - Thanks for posting the links - I'm definitely interested in checking out the articles.
Best regards,
Steve Berson