Disquiet

Over at the website of Ghostly International, they’re pushing the new Christopher Willits album, Surf Boundaries, due out in about a month, with a free download. “Yellow Spring” is a pop song by an electronic musician whose best work in the past has veered toward pop without ever reaching it (MP3). Thanks to a floating rhythm and a spirited if ephemeral vocal part, the track adheres to a beat without ever making its purpose clear. This is a notable achievement for Willits, who previously has largely avoided evident metrics in favor of ever-shifting rhythmic centers that rotated their heft like a planet making its course in a solar system comprised of many small suns. With “Yellow Spring” Willits keeps to the straight and narrow, but never succumbs to the metronomic impulse. And when the piece fades for its extended, centerless denouement, we get a taste of the Willits behind the beat. More info at christopherwillits.com.

The tonal aspects of Asher‘s contribution to the Homphoni netlabel (homophoni.com) are just a few held notes amid a broader, but still decidedly sparse, range of what seem to be field recordings. It’s amazing how static, water, small motors and distant industry can become indistinguishable from each other, even at 207kbps. The track, titled “The Anguish Is Not the Same” (MP3), cycles in and out, with extended periods of silence. It’s unclear if those occasional tones, first heard on their own, then below the light noise, are tonal centers of the found sounds or generated notes added later. That ambiguity brings creative tension to a piece that might, on first glance, appear to be willfully devoid of it.

The audio stacks of the Internet Archive at archive.org are less a record store than a thrift store, these spare pieces seemingly randomly dispersed, most without enough packaging material to explain the contents. Sometime in the past few days, a musician by the name of Tafkanhos uploaded something described as “free improvised quasi-ambient experimental audio,” a half hour of sound caught in limbo between shimmering and dank, claustrophobic and epiphanic (MP3). It would have been mysterious even if it weren’t unencumbered by virtually any sort of causal, interpretive or contextual data. In an age when every conceptual artist seems to have his or her own internal dramaturge, this can be very refreshing indeed.