Disquiet

The freaky thing about speaking in tongues isn’t how meaningless all that gibberish sounds. The freaky thing is how, despite the fact that it’s all nonsense syllables, glossolalia seems to contain meaning, like an ancient forgotten language, or something other and paraphysical. Transfer that sort of meaning-through-meaninglessness from words to beats and you have some sense of the rhythmic disjunction that is “Away” (MP3), the latest free monthly download from kracfive.com. Credited to Nepracww, a name that seems like a snippet of glossolalia itself, the piece plays like several different songs simultaneously, snippets of percussives never quite meshing, each one straining for your ear to identify it as the root rhythm. Despite which chaos, it sounds very much like a song.

By Marc Weidenbaum