It's odd, stangly odd. Yes, the album name is ( ), that's two parens. As for the group, it's an orchestra that dresses as clowns. The music however is not odd, but is quite good classical/pop music playing original pieces confronting social issues. It's most a modern 20th Century "Classical" feel, but it fuses all different genres to crate a very nice mix. Celebrity Cafe

O's Notes: This is the epitome of creativity and free expression. Paul Minotto leads a group of musicians through music that at times sounds like a carnival but is a bit more complex than basic popular music. These are adventurous and almost like a movie score, looking for scenes. It is music that is designed to provoke you and lives up to the promise. It's a new twist on jazz reminiscent of early dmp recordings from Flim & The BBs.

New Music Box The ultimate post-modern sound collage, Paul Minotto's compositions played by the Prime-Time Sublime Community Orchestra take every musical style imaginable and throw them together yielding a mixture of sounds that is both overwhelming and energizing. What is most fun about this recording is listening for all of the different influences, which are purposefully not really blended too much. Between classical melodies, jazz rhythms, sounds of '70s television themes songs, gongs, and Native American singing, I am sure that you will be able to identify a thousand more influences.

By David Lockeretz It's not often that you can hear the influences of Tchaikovsky, Dick Dale and Kung Fu on the same recording, but that is just the tip of the iceberg for Prime Time Sublime. This curious recording goes back and forth between sounding like the soundtrack for a Spielberg film and resembling John Zorn's Naked City without the Japanese screaming. (If you don't know who John Zorn is, chances are this CD is not for you.) I can't say it's stuff I'd listen to every day, but I certainly enjoy it once in a while. This orchestra breaks all the rules and it's hard not to be impressed by their unpredictability and their wide range of sounds, some of which sound like a bad day on the commode. You've gotta love song titles like "Holy War in your Pants" or "Invocation and Fanfare of the Tahitian Garbage Fairies." There is, I must say, a certain sameness to the CD after a while, the Latin feel of "Pomp & Vindaloo" and the South Pacific influence of "Invocation" notwithstanding. But while it's certainly not for every taste, it is a surefire way of scaring the heck out of your neighbors and friends. For my money, I have to admit that "Primetime Sublime" certainly is a sonic treat for anyone out there with an open mind. All six of you.

Imagine a bunch o' hip-hop dudes and jazz hepcats running into each other on the street and floating back to some classical musician's crib when she's stylin' with her own quartet. Introduce much gin. Once the party's really hoppin', give them instruments and let them go. That's what this album sounds like. The Prime-Time Sublime Community Orchestra is the mutant brainchild of one Paul Minotto, a composer, painter, and all-around swell guy who coordinates a virtual orchestra composed of musicians (both amateur and professional) and computers. (They also usually do this in public while dressed as clowns, but that's too surreal for me to get into here right now.) He has interesting ideas on art, music, life, death, and clowns -- feel free to read them in detail at the site -- and this translates into music that comes at you from a lot of different directions, yet ultimately feels like classical musical updated for modern sounds. While there are a great many like-minded orchestras in existence at the moment (many of them freaking out the public via labels like Public Eyesore, Fiend, and Unit Circle), few of them are as accessible as PTS. Minotto shares Sun Ra's sense of arranging and flair for the unexpected, but doesn't get anywhere near as dissonant as Ra (or any of his disciples); his classical parts are appropriately bombastic but not mired in weird experimental technicalities; his entire approach to tempo is entirely consistent with standard classical conventions. The result is a disc that's far more listenable -- and nowhere near as abrasive -- as some of the experimental orchestra offerings that have screeched at me lately. I could imagine (well, just barely) my mother actually liking this, or at least not loathing it.... The disc itself is contains six songs (or performance pieces, if you like), all mixing elements of jazz, classical, avant-garde electronics, techno, and more. "Holy War in Your Pants" incorporates both eastern and western instruments and references the bombing of the World Trade Center; "A Day at the Mall" fifties e-z listening mood muzak with free jazz, chanting, Chinese music, classical sounds, and even electrobeats. "Erectile Cognitive Bop Bits" revolves around a chamber group including harpischord and percussion, in which the sax and French horn do battle midway through. "Pomp & Vindaloo" (which starts off sounding just like an early-sixties jazz record) throws in everything but the kitchen sink -- bits of Indian music and splices of sound a la Cage, TV spy show theme music, even a rock riff or two, all floating around a chamber orchestra. One of my favorite tracks is "Felini's Pickup Truck," described in the promo poop as "what happens when a Bluegrass gorup and an avant-garde Jazz ensemble play a melody that sounds like it came form a Felini film. Dream sequences included." The categorization is most accurate. This may be the first time i have heard bluegrass in a classical concept, an idea so exquisitely deranged it fairly makes the mind quake with befuddlement. (It sounds real good, too.) The final track, "Invocation and Fanfare of the Tahitian Garbage Fairies" is just a big sprawling mess, like Funkadelic crashing a classical music rehearsal and spitting out funked-up cartoon music. WIth garbage trucks. (I have no idea what they're doing, but they're in there.) You can hear all this madness for yourself by gravitating (after you've finished the issue, dammit! it'll still be there when you're done -- trust me! you... you must belieeeeeeevvvveeeeeee....) over to their web site, where you can hear excerpts, or get a free copy of the cd, or buy it, or just look at all the pretty pictures and read the man's intriguing bits o' philosophy. It's all up to you.... RKF for DEAD ANGEL

The primeTime sublime Community Orchestra (ptsCO) is a dada symphony - multi-ethnic Jazz big band whose music is full of sardonic expression and zany aural wit. Led by conductor and genuine, musical patophysicist Paul Minotto, their "tunes" are ironically dysfunctional compositions for a dysfunctional world. Everything in them is a symptom of the disease of being modern, especially a modern American. They are Carl Stallings sonic contraptions, absurd as well as conceptually functional, indeed alive. Their mocking - and mock populist - spirit is conveyed by their titles: Holy War in Your Pants, A Day at the Mall, Not Nothing But a Replica of Nothing, Felini's Pickup Truck, Erectile Cognitive Bop Bits, Pomp & Vindaloo, Invocation and Fanfare of the Tahitian Garbage Fairies and A Small Thin Piece of a Big Fat Nothing. Note the "nothing" in the titles of two of the works. It makes explicit their nihilism - aggressive dadaistic nihilism. Indeed, they verge on chaos, for all their organization - seem to organize chaos. I remind you that such apocalyptic nihilism, however tempered by wit, was a kind of critique of the world in the original dadaists. It remains that in ptsCO's music. Thus, in Felini's Pickup Truck we find such sounds as a Kmart announcement, a cash register and a Ginsu knife commercial in the midst of a bad dream contrasted by Country music/ "Free" Jazz instrumental sections. Nihilism as a means of criticizing capitalism was widely used by the original dadaists, and it is still very fresh in ptsCo's music. Each of their compositions is a kind of world, or rather sonic salad - a playful seemingly spontaneous, even uncontrollable stream of free, aural associations that make no conventional sense. A wall of sound but not in the Phil Spector sense, at times one is overwhelmed by abrupt shifts of musical character or transported to a timeless void by subtle transformations of timbre. And this implies a simulation of madness - or else a trauma of the musicians (the same modernity we're all suffering from?) - which was another ambition of the original dadaists. Nonetheless, there is a good deal of musical sense in the details of ptsCO's works and in their overall construction. Flowing improvised textures give way to rhythmically complex composed passages, dissonant tonalities melt into banal triadic gestures, acoustic sounds become intertwined with abstract electronic sonorities. Style does not control the music, rather the music plays with various styles or perhaps even bastardizes them as an end to itself, blissfully ignorant of any distinctions of Pop/"Classical", low brow/ high brow, entertainment/art. The instruments employed are just as diverse as the genres that are exploded. Unusual combinations such as the Pipa (a Chinese string instrument), Bass Clarinet, French horns, American Indian chants and an electronic rock drum kit can be found in A Day at the Mall. The full String, Woodwind and Brass sections of Invocation and Fanfare of the Tahitian Garbage Fairies are augmented with a chanting Polynesian percussion ensemble, turntable, Rhodes electric piano, electric surf guitar and garbage trucks. Here, the uncommon is the common. The music of ptsCO, then, belongs in the absurdists tradition of modernity. It has a long and distinguished pedigree, and convincingly extend it. Each composition is an unholy mix of grandeur and irony, musical wit and sarcasm - a sonic deconstruction of modernity itself. In short, "A Small Thin Piece of a Big Fat Nothing".