In the month since Warp Records debuted a new Brian Eno track, a collaboration with poet Rick Holland titled “Glitch,” the song has received over 100,000 plays on Soundcloud.com. Warp has now followed that up with a second Eno-Holland collaborative track, which, like “Glitch,” is sourced from the sessions that yielded the forthcoming Drums Between the Bells, due out July 5. This second track, titled “Imagine New Times,” is very much a contrast with “Glitch”: sedate where “Glitch” was caffeinated, human (Eno reads Holland’s words) where “Glitch” was emphatically mechanical, free to download (well, for the price of your email address) where “Glitch” was streaming-only in advance of the album’s release. In addition, while “Glitch” actually appears on Drums Between the Bells, “Imagine New Times” is an outtake.
Eno’s voice comes across as self-consciously, even defiantly, aged here, slow enough for you to hear the wear on his vocal chords. That weathered sensibility finds a balance between the poem’s imagined “new times,” and the general impression of reflection, of, as the poem puts it, “paperweight lives [that] parade undesigned.” At the very end, when Eno repeats the title phrase for the umpteenth time, you can hear his voice crack. All the while a light click track emphasizes the passage of time, and attenuated bell tones gather in shifting layers.
Track found via pitchfork.com and twitter.com. More on the forthcoming album at brian-eno.net.
Never delete a dead RSS feed, because you never know when the feed will suddenly show signs of life. Late last year, for example, the great if far-from-prolific netlabel called “yoyo pang” 
The title of Tony Mahoney‘s recent Dusted Wax free netlabel download, the 11-track Product of a Dying Breed, is a conscious nod to the willfully backdated sound that he pursues. With the exception of a few vocal appearances on the recording, it’s purely instrumental hip-hop, and it’s made from the mix of steady beats and a minimal selection of samples that feels almost primordial in its sparseness. The aged quality is reinforced by how the tracks revel in the light sprinkling of vinyl surface noise that largely disappeared with the rise of digital production. Several pieces stand out, in particular a violin/piano/beats entry that lifts a smidgen of what appears to be Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” The reworking is titled “Broken Wingz,” and it’s to Mahoney’s credit that he manages to slowly erase the listener’s memory of the source material as his rendition proceeds — an especially tricky situation, given how deeply those notes are etched into our musical memories.