Ben Fleury-Steiner and Christopher McFall teamed up for The Dirty and the Clean, a three-track EP released earlier this year on the con-v.org netlabel. The music is a soundtrack to a journey through urban neglect. This much is clear in the sounds: the sullen stride of a wary wanderer, the gathering clouds of impending violence, the minor-key sense of concern. Whether it’s the metallic clanking of the first track (MP3; they’re all listed as “untitled”), the enveloping whirl with which opens the second (MP3), or the sour tonality of the third (MP3), they’re each a highly detailed map — not of a place, but of an emotional state. Fleury-Steiner explains the process in a brief liner note at the con-v.org website. He likens the performance/compositional process to “creating a musical environment I intended throughout to be a kind of reclaiming of what lay beneath the taken-for-granted, indeed, ‘dirty’ city underbelly.”
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Get the full release at con-v.org, where it’s also downloadable as massive, “loss-less” FLAC files.
More on Fleury-Steiner at myspace.com/bfsprojects, and on McFall at myspace.com/christophermcfall.
When is an album not an album? Perhaps when it consists of 20 songs — two of them topping 20 minutes each, over half over 10 minutes, none shorter than four — spread over three CDs, at which point it can feel as much like a challenge as it does an act of artistic self-expression. That’s certainly a teetering point that we’ll be debating in this week’s MP3 Discussion Group, where the object of our collective fixated listening is Leyland Kirby‘s elegiacally titled Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was, released on the label History Always Favours the Winners.
The drones of Herzog, born Bill Bawden, aren’t content to be content (that’s “content” without the accent on the first syllable). As heard on the five-track, half-hour First Summer and the Running Dream, the drones are rough things. They do crazy eights between your speakers, they chop the fluff off of cumulus hazes and reveal the sharp supporting structures beneath, they rattle like someone’s snuck in a bag of android crickets, and they summon up hearty submerged sounds that might give the unprepared listener a case of the bends. 
