It would of course be perfectly possible for a suitably instructed computer to perform Terry Riley’s In C on electronic instruments. This is what it might sound like. Riley’s instructions have been followed more or less accurately‚ though he has always preferred a larger ensemble than the 10 players used here. What the duo who call themselves zignorii++ have added is a great deal of unpitched percussion and electronic ‘programming’. The result is mostly very loud and consistently of middle and high pitch‚ since the only bass instrument is a cello. The pulsing octave Cs that Riley calls for are less emphatic than in other accounts‚ though they are of course implicit since the 53 melodic figures that the players work through at their own pace are all indeed ‘in C’. More seriously‚ not all of those figures are as clearly audible as they should be against the incessant burble of other instruments of similar pitch playing earlier or later figures‚ and they are for the most part played facelessly‚ as though on autopilot. The performance is billed as a ‘reinterpretation by zignorii++’ and the intention‚ according to the deeply pretentious booklet­note‚ is to transfer ‘the old distinction between classical agogics‚ on the one hand‚ and barreling through mechanically‚ on the other‚ to an area of tension in which EMP/zignorii++ occupy the middle ground between the electronic and the human‚ in a way analogous to much of today’s club music…the big hippy family of the 1960s has become today’s modest teamwork with substantial electronic support’. In so far as I understand those phrases they have succeeded: a minor classic has been minimalised and in the process dehumanised. Sabotage.