So, I was at a friend's house the other day, and his 9 year old daughter was telling us about how there's a video on her new NSync CD. One of the adults in the room was flabbergasted -- she had never heard of such a thing! I mentioned that it's pretty common these days for CDs, especially pop CDs, to come with some sort of multimedia content on them, so that you can just pop them into your computer and...in the case of a boy group like NSync, try to figure out who's the bad boy and who's the poetic one. To which another adult responded, "Yeah, but they'll never do that for any of the music that I'm interested in." Well, I'm not really sure what kind of music that fellow is into, but if he's into contemporary experimental art music, then boy do I have a CD for him!

Enhanced Gravity is a combination audio CD/multimedia CD-ROM that takes its name and theme from a satirical illustration drawn by an unknown artist in around 1687. The illustration pokes fun at Isaac Newton's then-controversial theory and law of gravitation, and presents us with nine variations on the basic idea: Absolute Gravity; Against Absolute Gravity; Partial Gravity; Comparative Gravity; Horizontal, Or Good Sense; Wit; Comparative Levity, Or Coxcomb; Partial Levity, Or Pert Fool; and Absolute Levity, Or Stark Fool. To make this intriguing CD, Yucca Tree Records gathered together nine audio artists/groups and had each of them contribute a piece using one of the types of gravity as its basis (it seems that some of the pieces were originally created for other purposes). Aesthetically, the pieces are all over the map, ranging from "Absolute Gravity" -- a noisy, sample-based collage by Chris Cutler & Bob Drake -- to Amy Denio's "Partial Gravity," a strange and lovely piece for hands slapping water, tabla and bagpipes. Faust contributes "Against Absolute Gravity", a distorted, noodly guitar and percussion duet, while Laurie Spiegel's "Partial Levity, Or Pert Fool" evokes visions of an odd airport where electronic windchimes are attached to all of the planes. There are additional pieces from Diledadafish, Noble Gas, Un Drame Musical Instantané, Pointless Orchestra and Steve Horowitz, each of them interesting in their own way. And that's just the audio portion of the CD! The CD-ROM portion contains a section for each artist, including small multimedia works, additional sounds and images and information on the artist. As usual, I found that I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to navigate the CD-ROM and waiting for it to load, but that didn't stop me from enjoying most of the content. It's clear that the multimedia portion of the project is not quite as accomplished as the audio, but that doesn't bother me. Enhanced Gravity seems to work best as primarily an audio CD, with the added benefit of additional content and information on the CD-ROM part. It's a well-made, fun and engaging project, and I hope that we see more of this sort of thing from the less pop-oriented side of the music world as time goes by.