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Anyone expecting a straightforward "books-on-tape"-style reading will realize their error after only a few minutes... Weirdly rippling strings and clangorous thunder open the work. The narrator's voice is delivered very ordinarily over a wispy, morphing backdrop. During Alice's fall down the rabbit hole, three-and-one-quarter minutes into the story, crazily shifting backwards speech begin to stream over the words. With eerie slashes of violins backing Alice's first steps into Wonderland, the next segment continues rather normally again, until after the first "Drink Me" episode, mournful strings, repeated phrases and blurry speech indicate that things are getting curiouser again...
The characters' voices (besides Alice of course, there are the white rabbit, the cheshire cat, the queen of hearts, the hookah-puffing caterpillar, the mad hatter, the mock turtle and many more) are fragmented, sped up, slowed down, stretched, compressed, flanged, repeated, inverted and subjected to all other means of distortion. I never did get over the disappointment I'd re-experience each time the narrative would go inaudible beneath prolonged stretches of overaggressive background soundtrack, or be sliced-and-diced into completely unintelligible bits. (I found an online text of the book (at literature.org) to help with some of the less-than-comprehensible and totally lost parts).
Musical interludes are sometimes delivered in warped symphonic styles, but often are just spooky, slurry drones or self-repeating fragments. Electroacoustic textures and just-plain-twisted arrangements add further mystery to the subversively deconstructive/reconstructive proceedings.
If nothing else, I'll remember to heed the Duchess' advice... "Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you are or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise".
Granted it's an awesome project, but for those whose ears aren't so attuned to the esoteric, I can imagine that this work could become ponderously overwhelming. Fortunately, there are "tracks" breaking the whole into more easily digested parts.
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