Disquiet

The loopdiary.com website collects a fairly steady schedule of guitar-based soundscapes, 20 so far this year by a single musician who goes by the name Disproduction. These are loops, but not loops as in brief presets that you can download and use as patterns in your home audio-production setup. No, these are long-form loop-based performances, in which sounds recur repeatedly, over an extended duration, overlapping with themselves and their derivations, and develop a sleepy realm of aural ghost images. How long is long-form? Two thus far clock in at over 10 minutes. Disproduction describes them as follows: “Semi-ambient guitar improvisations using a single guitar, various effects and long recurring delays. … Sometimes referred to as ‘frippertronics’, these pieces are minimally edited, nominally processed, and likely uninteresting.” That’s an accurate description, aside from the “uninteresting” line. Particularly recommended are “03.12.05a,” which has a nearly vocal effect in its silk-thin harmonies, and the more evidently guitar-produced accents of “03.21.05a.” Among the more dissonant entries are “02.02.05a.mp3,” which highlights a more varied number of contrasting elements than do most of the pieces here, and “03.08.05b.mp3,” which milks what appears to be a particularly tangy alternate tuning. The site’s homepage appropriately features a mythological beast eating its own tail.

By Marc Weidenbaum