Bedroom musicians honing ambient textile music on their sticker-emblazoned laptops often listen back to the masterpieces of Brian Eno and wonder how, exactly, especially during those distant pre-PowerBook times, he achieved the levels of aural thoroughness and opacity, clarity and …
The design of New York-based composer Kenneth Kirschner’s eponymous website couldn’t be more elegant. It simply presents a horizontal, chronological chart of his work, subdivided into increments of between two and five years. On the far left is a piece …
So, is Loscil a minimal melodicist or a melodic minimalist? Is the contrast just a matter of vice-versa wordplay, or is there something distinct about someone who keeps melodies threadbare, almost monotone, with an emphasis on repetition, and someone else …
The Disquiet Downstream focuses on recordings posted by musicians online for intended download. Occasionally a demonstratively law-flouting set, like DJ Danger Mouse’s matchmaking between Jay-Z and the Beatles, last year’s Grey Album, vaults itself into the near-public domain through sheer …
The vast depths of archive.org’s holdings are difficult to come to grips with. Even putting the public-domain text and video material aside, there seems to be enough music by the Grateful Dead alone to play for a good year …
Start off the work week with two fine background-music instrumental hip-hop tracks from Telephone Jim Jesus, off his late-2004 album, A Point Too Far to Astronaut (Anticon). TJJ’s “Little Boy One Eye,” which runs a romantic piano loop and genre-complementary …
A quick one to end the week. The Uran97 netlabel’s latest release (number 24) is M.M.B.’s Robot Work Area, an exercise in vaguely Kraftwerkian mechanoid funk, updated with raspy touches of glitch and an abiding affection for moire patterns of …
When musician Maciek Szymczuk titled his EP Romantic Piano for Lovers, he meant lovers of surface-noise-laden, static-laced, beats-all-a-flutter minimal techno, with saw blade string sections and chest-pounding thuds of subterranean dread. Or he was just being ironic. Either way, RPfL …
The natural applause that closes the recent MP3 up at William Fowler Collins’ website, wfowlercollins.ath.cx, signals that the recording is, indeed, of a live performance. Up until that moment, you may not be certain, though a cough midway through …
Dale Lloyd’s Turba / Lateral Minor is characteristic of the netlabel that released it, and just to be clear: that’s a compliment. Like many a Stasisfield Records free download, Lloyd’s recording not only keeps quiet noises in the foreground by …