Month: September 2011

Spirituals are about faith, and so it is a leap of faith that one takes when absorbing the deep dark drone that is Crypsis, a recent single-track release by Horchata. This is because the Crypsis drone, solitary and harmonically dense as it appears to be, reportedly was derived from spirituals. “Each of the song elements, there are 10 of them in this long one-hour ambient song, are from popular spirituals,” explains Horchata in a brief liner note at the releasing netlabel, darkwinter.com. “I took the overall song structure and chord progression and used drones and long evolving sounds.” To listen for the spirituals in Crypsis seems counterproductive. To listen for something is to fail to listen to something. Take the composer at his word as to the source material, and then just bask in the room-filling buzz (MP3).

More on the release at darkwinter.com.

There is a whole subgenre of latter-day trip-hop that melds the kind of reflective moodiness perpetrated by Ennio Morricone in classic movie scores and the loop-focused efforts of bedroom beatmakers. The situation, the correlation, between Morricone’s music and studio beats may be the result of a simple conflation in the public imagination, since both Morricone’s work and dub music, a key part of trip-hop’s origin, have the meldodica as one of their constituent parts. And, of course, both traffic in somber melodrama. Still, there’s no melodica in “New World,” one of the keeper tracks on Frenic‘s recent EP, Lessons from the Past (MP3), and yet it takes little more than a whistle and a tersely looped guitar to suggest a Morricone remix at work.

Get the full EP, seven tracks in all, for free download at dustedwax.org. It is the 100th release from the excellent netlabel (just as yesterday’s entry was the 100th entry for the Resting Bell netlabel). More on Frenic, aka Sam Fergusson of Bristol in Britain, at soundcloud.com/frenic.

The Resting Bell netlabel steadily releases music that fits into a grey zone between field-recording ambience and drone-for-drone’s-sakeness. That’s a distinction that can seem like hairsplitting on first listen, but in time a whole world of variety can be heard in between. And speaking of time, Resting Bell is celebrating a milestone: its 100th release. It’s doing so with a four-part series, the first of which is by Japanese sound artist Shinobu Nemoto. Titled Tetsuo, it’s a three-part EP that explores a high-pitched approach to drone, more dawn break than storm cloud, more scintillate than rumble. Track two, for example, lets a rising and falling wisp slither through a bright thicket of glistening static. The contrast is striking, especially how the various levels of pitch of that main thread highlight different aspects of the unwavering sonic field (MP3).

Get all three tracks of Tetsuo at restingbell.net.

Two earlier works by Nemoto have been highlighted here: a series of 16 “trips” back in December of last year and heavily processed melodies back in 2009.