Disquiet

Electronic musician Greg Davis has gotten a mention in the Disquiet Downstream about once a month of late, and if his current online music distribution venture keeps up its initial pace, his appearances may become even more frequent. In August the Downstream featured free downloads courtesy of Amazon.com, off his 2004 album Curling Pond Woods (link). In July it was an extended mix of Grateful Dead songs (link). And in June it was a full solo live set he’d posted as part of the Kranky Records label’s ongoing download feature at kranky.net (link). That concert performance, recorded live at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is now one of many that Davis is posting at the Internet Archive, or archive.org. The Internet Archive doesn’t provide mnemonic-friendly URLs for specific musicians, so you’ll need to follow the following link to get to Davis’ uploads (link). As of this typing, there are 16 from shows that happened in November of 2004, and one highlight among them (MP3) was recorded a the Drake in Toronto on the 15th. A brief review by a fairly prolific Internet Archive commentator reads, in part: “This is a long drone set. If you want some audial hypno-therapy then this is great. I am glad there are people who make this, but I prefer a bit more intelluctual stimulation.” To my ears, while the music indeed starts as a drone, it becomes far more than that; it develops its own rhythm as time passes, taking on the cast of a immersive, meditative Terry Riley piece. The MP3 link above is a lofi 64Kbps (a mere 13mb for nearly half an hour of music), but the set is available in four different compression standards, including a “lossless” 192mb version (link). There’s immersive, and then there’s submersive.

By Marc Weidenbaum