Disquiet

It begins cinematically, with a heartbeat, some typewriter keys, the distant crack of lightning and a small amount of rain. Or maybe that’s a car revving, its gears shifting, followed by the crackle of fire. It’s all sound, so you lend your own mental images to help find your way, much as the track in question, “Sullen City,” the opening piece to Layborn‘s five-song Rubik, eventually introduces a hard, if limber, rhythm to lend structure to the looping swell that’s been rising in the background (MP3). Nothing like a simple back beat to locate the tempo of a seemingly organic sine wave. Rubik falls squarely in what’s called minimal techno. It’s about the beat the way certain films are about place and certain novels are about ideas, in both cases rather than being about character. It’s all background, even when it veers into the foreground, as with the percussive chatter of “A Pin in the Sky” (MP3) or more of that field-recording drama, again rain, on “Solitary Drive” (MP3). The balletic torque of an undertone in “Wires and Whispers Came” (only available if you download the complete, archived files: ZIP) brings to mind Peter Gabriel’s Passion, his score to Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, while at its most minimal, on the closing, the sonic matter is nothing but tiny slivers of static masquerading as drums. More info on the website of the releasing netlabel, archipel.cc.

By Marc Weidenbaum