Not all charts are created equal. The wisdom of crowds can be a lot more convincing on a message board than on a sales chart. The top 10 albums of a given week, according to Soundscan, can be more a reflection of conventional wisdom and reactive consumerism than of individual taste or the state of the art. By contrast, on Internet forums where musicians post their own music for peer input, the accumulated number of comments can be a dependably solid sign of some solid work.
As of this morning, for example, the most commented upon entry among the 20 most recent threads in the “Beats/Instrumentals Showcase” forum at cratekings.com is a pair of grimy, artfully crafted rhythm tracks by one panamacanal. The thread is titled “New Beat Plz Check Out.”
The first and the real keeper, “Introducing … Intro” (MP3, zshare.net), is, as the producer says in his brief note, a Public Enemy-flavored flare-up, opening with that hip-hop trifecta: gunshot, hi-hat, strings. It doesn’t have the density commonly associated with the best Bomb Squad productions for Public Enemy, but it does have the ambient filigree, dramatic tension, and earnest vibe. “Life Hell” has a similarly classic opening: orchestral grandeur that drops, vertiginously, to downtempo swagger, a sweet lope of a loop played under some period spoken soul (MP3, zshare.net).
And both are, frankly, better — more interesting, moody, and detailed — than just about anything on the new Nas album, aside perhaps from its opening track.
(If the above MP3 links don’t function, just use the zshare.net service.)
The collection of “short” pieces on Adrian Kowalczewski‘s seven-song EP Short Dance Songs aren’t all danceable — except in the “intelligent dance music” sense of the word: jittery, blurpy figments of digital pop that mess with beats as they go but have a syrupy, sweet, yet engaging sentimentality to them. They range through a series of 21st-century variations, including “Short Movie Song” (
The slowly circulating drones of “Gray Sky,” a free download by Ryonkt, supply 17 minutes of audio bliss. Layers of sound appear occasionally with some suddenness, only to be absorbed immediately into the cloud-like whole (
A British musician and sound artist living and working in Berlin, Helena Gough likes to say she makes something from nothing. She takes field recordings of our real world and creates new audioscapes from them, thanks to microsonic manipulation and an empasis on a narrative-like song structure; there may be loops involved, but each effort feels through-composed, even improvised.