The Pool K III is Paul Bowles' most unfathomable musical work, one not
yielding to easy interpretation. It is a realm of sound that creates a
dreamlike journey without a clear point of origin or destination--a
sojourn to be experienced in its entirety, without stopping.
With The Pool K III, Paul Bowles has created in eight separate tracks
a work particularly unique to even his own wide-ranging catalog of
compositions--a piece within the genre of musique concrete, a type of
experimental music that gained recognition as a result of the
soundscapes of Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherche de Musique
Concrete at the beginning of the 1950s. To a great extent, there was an
aleatory element at play in their creations; musicians made numerous
tape manipulations to alter sound, such as looping and splicing, at
random and often included inadvertently-created sound and unconventional
sources as part of their finished works. Widely-accepted conventions
pertaining to music theory, rhythm and instrumentation were not
considered essential elements to compositions. By contrast,
improvisation was regarded as an essential part of the sound creation
process.
