Month: February 2011

There’s a difference between sampling a Nina Simone song and sampling a forest. The wind and trees have no lawyers waiting to stake a claim on the composition that results. The composer John Luther Adams, for example, doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, worried that he’ll be hauled into Alaska’s Supreme Court to face charges of pilfering the recordings that have served as the bedrock of some of his works. The Park Service isn’t trolling whosampled.com looking for litigation fodder.

So, if there’s nothing to hide, then what is there to gain? To what extent does it matter, does it help, for a listener to know the source of a field recording appearing in music that takes that field recording and manipulates it, transforms it? The question isn’t central to “Pathways in the Inverted Forest” by Will Thomas Long, but it does linger
(MP3). For 20 minutes, the lulling track, a drone that shift this way and that, like a moored boat, gives one plenty of time to think. The brief liner note at the relatively new netlabel Absence of Wax informs us that the piece consists of synthesized sounds and field recordings, and was created in Tokyo, Japan, this past month.

We don’t, from the way the information is phrased, technically know that the field recordings are from Japan, or even from a forest — they’re implications of the title and (shown above) cover image, but that is all. It’s worth spending time listening through the piece for its sample source. Are there telltale wind currents, textures, some aural fingerprint?

More on Long at thesingularwe.org and devinsarno.com/absenceofwax. He is best known as half of Celer, the duo he established with his wife, the late Danielle Marie Baquet, who passed away in 2009 a few weeks short of her 27th birthday.

Rare these days is the glitch album that doesn’t ultimately disappoint. Like “dubstep,” the term “glitch” has been yanked from its utility and, a victim of its relative success, turned into a label attached to music by companies and musicians eager for the association, though not for the ingenuity necessary to really earn the rubric. In the case of “glitch,” it means music that explores the beauty in failure (and, arguably, the failure of beauty). Often as not, a glitchy opening to a song reveals, eventually, a cursory appreciation for the actual pleasures of the risk inherent in the undertaking. The glitchy effects move to background from foreground, and more immediately melodic and rhythmic elements supplant them.

And then you get a nice surprise: Precocious Mouse‘s 2_3/.dll (grey circuits) (from the netlabel brusionetlabel.altervista.org) knows exactly what it’s up to, and over the course of nine tracks explores the rarefied, splintering spaces of glitch with precision, affection, and no small amount of patience, for constructing some of these tracks may have required the kind of effort that goes into making a ship in a bottle. “Phasecycle,” for example, plays glitch against drone, a flittery pattern in pixel-wide beats versus a worrisome hum (MP3). And “dll_1_1_alpha_e” is even more remote, like the dying gasps of a satellite circuit recorded for its loved one back in the recesses of ground control’s freezer unit (MP3).

The “dll” in the album title (and various track names) appears to be a reference to those countless infinitesimal system files that dirty up Windows installations. Oval, one of glitch’s true originators, may have dispensed with the genre’s aural trappings on his recent works, but Precious Mouse shows there’s still life in the particulate.

Get the full release at brusionetlabel.altervista.org. More on Precious Mouse (aka Caleb Wood, aka Kid Functional), who is based in London, England, at precociousmouse.virb.com.