Disquiet

On May 21, Chris Herbert opened for Stars of the Lid in at a concert in Birmingham, England, and the very next day he posted a 45-minute MP3 of the set — “I managed to record the indistinct buzzing noises from my laptop,” as he put it on his myspace.com/chrisherbert blog entry. The file is available solely via a generic file-transfer service (sendspace.com, MP3), which means it’s there for a fairly limited, and indeterminate, period of time. As of this writing, all 85 megabytes of it are still online — and it isn’t merely, or even specifically, a collection of “indistinct buzzing noises.” There is buzzing, and crackling, and industrial sound, yes, like the atmosphere of a construction site being shut down for a long weekend. But those sounds are triggered in Herbert’s laptop amidst a series of utterly un-terrestrial atmospheric settings, opening with a haze-of-dawn burst of sparkling energy, through a generously syrupy space of slow undulations, through dank minimal-techno maze, and various other mysterious elsewheres.

By Marc Weidenbaum