San Francisco Bay Guardian: As beautiful as the pastoral/celestial meditations of Brian Eno or Kitaro -- if either one of those musicians chewed glass.      

Music and Sound Output: Perhaps the oddest music I have ever heard, it's also more the sound of lives lived, and lives lost, than any music I have ever heard. --

Die Zeit: Ostertag did not simply create a political piece but a musical reality, ...great music, a music that has something to do with life again.

Cadence: Truly powerful political art is rare, but this is some.

High Performance: Listening to this piece is like embracing someone who has no skin, a bare mass of nerves and guts and blood, which stain your own clothes when you touch.

Q.U.E.E.R. zine: To say that this has made me radically rethink my use of the word "queer" is an understatement.

Torso: Odd and genius. Like nothing before or after, I promise.      

Keyboard Magazine August: A gleeful savagery, with the droll wit of Satie's piano pieces, the breathless silences of Japanese music, the collaged clutter of Stockhausen's short-wave radio suites, and the political bite of Brecht/Weill songs.

Junk food and trash were the makings of "Between Science and Garbage" by Bob Ostertag, an electronic composer, and Pierre Hébert, an animator, on Thursday night. The music started with Mr. Ostertag popping the top of a Coke can; he handed the can to Mr. Hébert, who put its image on screen, to be combined with images of a swinging watch, an apple and a computer motherboard that looked like a city seen from the air. There were also drawings that Mr. Hébert made on the spot of a man falling, reaching for the apple or diving into a garbage can.

Meanwhile Mr. Ostertag and his computer layered pop-tops, fizzes, rubber-duck squeaks and the crunch of chips into assemblages that could be sparse and funny. Then he transformed them into thick, rumbling, throbbing soundscapes like distant ominous factories. The imagery grew apocalyptic: a city buried or perhaps bombed, a man perpetually plunging and reappearing. Despite its comic moments, the piece left eerie memories.

April 28, 1992.
by ???????

Bob Ostertag's "All the Rage" turned the evening on its head with a devastating roar of gay anger.  Of recent concert pieces having to do with AIDS, "All the Rage" seems by far the most powerful example.  Mr. Ostertag's stern, purifying gaze has swept away the sentimentality and melodrama that have compromised more famous compositions in the genre.

Ostertag's first show at the Knitting Factory, featuring saxophonist John Zorn, opened with a series of intense improvisations.  The show was Ostertag's first performance under his own name in eight years: at one time a regular collaborator on the downtown scene, Mr. Ostertag recently spent time as a journalist.
    Mr. Ostertag was in good humor, and on the opening piece he lowered the pitch of sounds Mr. Zorn had made by playing his instruments in water, transforming them into the intestinal grumblings of a Hollywood monster.  The audience laughed, and Mr. Zorn honked and screeched.
     [The concert finished] in a staccato section that had all the excitement of a funk band, and had the audience cheering.

By almost any measure, Bob Ostertag is an extreme radical.  His raw material is the world.  He digs his trowel into the wet cement of everyday life, where nothing is really permanently set, anyway, and plasters it in impressionistic smears and pointillistic dabs across the walls of our perception... His strategies range somewhere between those of John Cage, academic computer musicians, brutally expressive free improvisers, and Che Guevara...
  With entrance into Ostertag's world comes a severe attitude adjustment.  You have to curb your brain, dump your 'common sense' judgments, and peel away the calluses that have built up over the vulnerable core of your senses.  Listening becomes cultural time travel at warp speed.  Time, however, jumps off its linear tracks.  You have to accept  both the simultaneity of your feelings and your hapless  inability to control them.  Scary Stuff.
    Listening to Ostertag can be like looking at an aged oak.  It's as if the same force that turns gnarly bark, twisted trunk, and random crooked branch patterns into a perfect, beautiful tree is transforming these coarse and ostensibly unrelated sounds into music.  The 'music-ness' of Ostertag's work is no less than the 'tree-ness' of the oak; we're just not trained to hear it.

    With the "New Music, New York" series happening at the Kitchen, it is important to note the existence of another experimental music scene.  I'm referring to the wild rebel underbelly of "free" musicians which includes Eugene Chadbourne, John Zorn, and Bob Ostertag.  This is one scene that is below the underground, without even as much established recognition as the established school represented at the Kitchen.
   This music is in a whole new realm.  These guys aren't just peering into the doorway of the unknown: they've taken a flying leap into the Black Hole.  DEVO described their first album as 'The important sound of things falling apart.'  Ha!  They don't even know the half of it.

Last Plane to Jakarta:  There is a special pleasure that comes from things that are genuinely fucked up.  Things that only try are one of the late 20th century's greatest annoyances, but things that succeed are one of life's timeless pleasures.  I don't mean bizarre, who's-drugged-the-water-supply things, and I don't mean odd, does-it-really-exist things.  The particular joy I am talking about is reserved for a precious few things in this life, and it's a joy whose expression finds its repose in a face cloudy with disbelief while the mouth attached to it, hanging half-open, slurs: "Whoa, Dude.  That's some enormously fucked-up shit."
    Try putting a whole coconut, shell and all, into a high-powered blender  with its lid off, and then punch the liquefy button.  The ensuing chaos in your kitchen will provide a visual rough equivalent to track 1.  After that things get really weird.
    If you've ever bought a record just because it was too God-damned weird to just let it sit there on the rack getting ignored, you probably ought to pick this one up.