Disquiet

One is tempted to call Larkian‘s “Droxma_1″ a drone, but it’s so much more than that, more specific, more earthly, more tangible. There’s too much detail in “Droxma_1″ to relegate it to mere, to even superior, drone-ness. It begins in these shifting waves of tone, with particulate percussion flitting in and out. Drone purists might consider the noises to be flies in the ointment, but in this case the extra material makes the whole thing all the more interesting, more eventful, more palatable. At nearly half an hour, “Droxma_1″ begins in one place (this nascent realm of sounds competing, lazily, for prominence) and drives eventually to elsewhere, to a peak of rollicking maximalism, like a Glenn Branca symphony, like one of Michael Gordon’s post-rock chamber works, like the famous “tuning up” moment in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” but distended, like some tumultuous communal experience replayed on the evening newscast in slow motion. “Droxma_1″ is the third and most recent release from the adozen.org netlabel. It’s available in two file sizes: 256 kbps (MP3) and 128 kbps (MP3). In general, the latter should be sufficient for casual listening, but this piece deserves the density of the higher bit rate.

By Marc Weidenbaum