Disquiet

The previous Disquiet Downstream entry from the musician known as Souns, “Senseless in Space” (here, from back in September of this year), was an accomplishment, and not just in musical terms. Sure, its ambiguous rhythmic play amid aquatic ambience was a pleasure to listen to, but perhaps more to its credit was simply how it had managed to distinguish itself amid the vast context in which it first appeared: as one track among 34 (yes, 34) on the Kikapu netlabel’s Wein, Weib und Gesang compilation, a mere eight minutes in the set’s nearly five hours (yes, five hours) of sound. Two months after the release of Wein, Weib came an 11-track Souns full length, titled Lights. The key elements of “Senseless in Space” are here in spades, the watery feel becoming literal on “Orange” (eight of the set’s tracks take colors as titles, including Duke Ellington’s favorite, “Indigo”), in which field recordings of splashy waves play against a low throb out of the Underworld handbook, and figurative on “Rain,” which samples a percussive rainstick (a closed tube filled with small beans). The familiar industrial undertow pervades the album, notably on “Open Tones,” a lengthy dirge, and “Red,” which has the jumpy pulse of a small machine come to life. The album note on the Kikapu sites explains that this music was created for use during the recent New Forms festival in Vancouver, for an event with “ancient healing” as its theme, and much of the music reportedly involves crystal bowls, credited to a Christine Duncan; also contributing is Anomalous Disturbances, aka ambient guitarist Terry O’Brien. (Souns, by the way, is a pseudonym for Michael Red.) Secular humanists should be forewarned that the album’s description is thick with talk of mantras and chakras, but the music doesn’t bear the marks of typical spiritual-shop background music; there are no canned tropes of indigenous spiritual ceremony, no sign at all of keyboard presets marked “Epiphany.” It’s just expertly textured extended tones that don’t swell so much as they rise up, gently but intently, like a Tule fog. Download the full album here, and check out the netlabel at Kikapu.com. A remix project from Souns, titled Coloured Lights, is said to be due out through Kikapu early next year.

After a month off here at Disquiet.com, a return to free music on the web. John Kannenberg‘s Four Painters EP collects piercing, minimalist tributes to a quartet of modern master visual artists: Paul Klee, Agnes Martin, Kazimir Malevich and Cy Twombly. Each track appears at first as little more than the sort of server-room rumble familiar in most 21st-century office buildings, a mix of chillingly high tones and some intangible thudding in the low to mid-range. Over time, with each listen, each piece takes its own surprisingly individual shape: the Klee with its cinematically rich opening, the way in which staggered samples are echoed into a reverberant, ecstatically ominous haze, and its penchant for the odd mechanical cesura; the Martin, the way its near inaudible opening comes to singular glow; the Malevich, the most varied of the four, how it moves from UFO hovering to a dog’s pant; and the Twombly, which goes as deep and wide as the Martin does high and narrow. Ranging in length from eight to over 13 minutes, the compositions last long enough to get lost in. Kannenberg’s passion for his subjects is evident particularly in the rich rhythms of the Klee and in the teeth-rattling intensity of the Martin as its root pitch rises. These selected artists aren’t merely prime figures from the 20th-century canon. Each in one way or another helped set the aesthetic stage for today’s electronic music: Klee with his colorful abstractions, Malevich with his affection for monolithic simplicity, Martin and her elegant graphs, which always looked like silent musical compositions in the first place, and Twombly with his gestural simplicity. One looks forward to another set of Kannenberg MP3s at an exhibition; here’s a vote for Robert Ryman, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian and, just for the fun of it, Jack Kirby. Available for free download here from the Stasisfield netlabel, which Kanneberg runs. More info at stasisfield.com.