Disquiet

The 19th (of 20) free giveaways from the Ninja Tune label, intended to celebrate its 20th anniversary, contains five tracks from Bonobo (aka Simon Green). The core of the gift is “Ghost Ship,” a bit of what might have been called acid jazz once upon a time, never before available — and with it come four remixes of tracks from his Days to Come and recent Black Sands albums. “Ghost Ship” is all looped tinkling pianos and other jazz elements turned into downtempo exotica. Also among the five tracks is an Aaron Jerome mix of “Walk in the Sky,” which has a similar feel but adds a vocal worthy of Eartha Kitt. The real keeper is a remix of “Ketto” credited to Kidkanevil, which is little more than the barest of rhythms being made as if on old soup cans with dull knives, amid a slowly swirling bed of synthesized sounds; it sounds a bit like if Konono No. 1 had taken a field trip to Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios.

Speaking of the Ninja Tune giveaways, the tracks have been coming too quickly to keep track of, since they’re available for a limited time. The Bonobo is only around for about another three days. You just missed an Amon Tobin piece, and before that was a great mix by Kid Koala that mixed up Henry Mancini and Autechre, Dan the Automator and Boards of Canada. Most of the source material for Koala’s mix was available in video form, so for kicks I put together this streaming video playlist/mixtape (which of course, by definition, misses the finesse and invention that Koala brought to his deeply transformed versions of the material):

It’s also accessible via youtube.com/user/mwd1.

Keep an eye out for the next and final Ninja Tune XX giveaway. Potentially it’ll be something from Coldcut, the duo that founded Ninja Tune, though they’re not exactly musicians who draw attention to themselves at the expense of their roster. Perhaps it’ll be a remix of an early Ninja track done up by a more recent artist signee. Given the choice, I’d appreciate some previously unreleased Up, Bustle and Out.

More on the anniversary at ninjatunexx.com, and on the label at ninjatune.com, and on Bonobo/Green at bonobomusic.com.

Time-sensitive free downloads are the new remix contest, the new ubiquitous promotional opportunity. So it was no surprise when an email arrived from djshadow.com offering a pair of free MP3s, albeit only for 24 hours. For several years now, the email missives from DJ Shadow‘s website have been increasingly commercial in intent and content — they’re more likely to be about hoodies than music. So, this free offer was a doubly positive occurrence, even if Shadow’s website for half of today proved to be overburdened by the popularity of the offer. As it turns out, the files aren’t even hosted at djshadow.com — they’re over at djshadow.bandcamp.com, where in exchange for your email address, you’ll get a Zip file containing two songs, “I’ve Been Trying” and “Def Surrounds Us,” both reportedly off his 2011 album, which currently lacks a title.

The site describes “Def Surrounds Us” as “electro/dubstep/dnb-inspired epic” — and while there remains something a bit awkward about the adoption of the word “dubstep” by musicians, such as Shadow, whose body of work preceded its existence, the use isn’t mistaken here. It’s a heavy, lengthy (almost eight minutes) pop-like track that ultimately, fortunately, is more about collage than it is about song. Its title is a playful mishearing of a bit of found audio with which it opens (“Though we are alive, death surrounds us”), and it proceeds like a beat-intensive suite, from synth handclaps that bring to mind early hip-hop, to video-game triumphalism, to tribal headiness, to a quasi-Gregorian section that suggests what the Enigma catalog will sound like when it’s inevitably resuscitated for a post-Burial/Shackleton audience. What the track may lack in the gloriously messy confusion of Shadow’s early work, it makes up for cinematic narrative surprise.

One note: The timing of the release puts “Def Surrounds Us” right smack in the middle of news that the site where the sounds reside, bandcamp.com, will soon begin charging for free downloads — which is to say, Bandcamp will start charging musicians for the opportunity to post free downloads. The news is not entirely surprising (hosting costs money), but it has hit the netlabel community hard, because many labels have been using Bandcamp to host their catalogs. Likely many of them will be moving to archive.org as a result.