Disquiet

Musician Jose Maria Rodrigo pilots his drone-based electronic music onto your headphones like someone bringing a massive starship in slow and steady. “Industria Proxima,” off his July 10 Montgo netlabel release, Por Debajo de las Cosas Ordinarias, opens with an underlying murmur, the sound of a sizable object some distance away. While it blossoms, a distant rumble gaining proximity, the foreground comes alive with small activities, little curlicues of electronic chores, sounding like routine protocol checks monitored by semi-sentient, whimsically efficient autobots. The result is the sound design for a quotidian Pixar short about life on a space station. The album opens with “Presencia Humana,” all garbled communication amid more of that starship systems hum. All of the tracks provide the ambience of deep industrial activity. Or, as Rodrigo told Montogo: “In my work as sound technician I have often been paying my total mental-sensorial attention to landscapes or sound objects that a priori seemed empty or insignificant and discovering in them a rare beauty.” The sole exception to Por Debajo‘s extreme remoteness is the electric piano that appears, briefly, on “Presencia Superior”; jarring amid the otherwise mechanistic terrain, it’s like some memory shard of past human interaction. More info at montgorecords.com.

The beautiful thing about artificially produced harmonies, like the picturesque swamp musk of David Last‘s three-minute “Landscape” (MP3), is the indefinite division between a singular complex sound and a set of individual sounds. The piece plays out like a Southern Gothic organ solo, slow as molasses, and about as thick, too. It comes and goes at its own pace, but it isn’t clear what is a matter of carefully placed simultaneous notes, and what is an accident of overtones; what is a matter of matched sonic elements, and what is a trace or refraction of the main sound source. The shape of the harmony, at times wide, at others relatively compact, always fairly dense, moves like a blob across the Platonic staves of the mind’s sheet music. “Landscape” should be heard alongside last week’s “Ghost of the Gulag (Reprise)” by Raz Mesinai (entry), because both are quasi-classical forays by young musicians more closely associated with the Third World studio machinations of dub. On Last’s website, davidlast.net, “Landscape” is described as “Mellow Orchestral Sculpty Beatless,” which just about sums it up. A side note explains “This is an unreleased track that will be part of a sooper-mellow type of release later this year.” Here’s looking forward to it.