Disquiet

Tell someone in Toronto, while visiting from San Francisco, how lovely, walkable, vibrant and diverse their city is and they’ll say, “Come back in mid-January.” Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that a netlabel with the uneasy name Dark Winter (darkwinter.com) has released an album of Canadian origin, some of it “initially recorded in various burnt out and abandoned buildings throughout Toronto” earlier this year, the site explains. The album is As Everything Fell from the Sky by ANGELswing, aka Adam Dollard, who perpetrates a uniquely claustrophobic brand of experimental audio. “Maybe Today, Aronud Six” layers piano parts that rub up against each other just beyond the realm of believable live playing, and as a result concentrates your listening on the spare melodies’ internal logic. Piano, or piano-like sounds, provide a kind of theme on the album, lending a muddy beat and an out-of-the-blue bit of frill to “As His Muoth Went Dry” and triggering a nostalgia-tinged figure that haunts “It Started Around Elevne.” Many of the tracks on As Everything Fell from the Sky embrace rough furrows of abraded sound, such as the slow, dry spacelessness of “There Were No Streetlihgts.” Every song title on the album has a misspelling, which the brief liner note at Dark Winter explains is willful. Of course, the music itself takes a far more strenuous approach to unsettling the listener than mere typographical play. Oh, and kudos to Dark Winter for doing something few netlabels think of: recommending key tracks.

By Marc Weidenbaum