Don’t read too much into genre. It’s a label, a brief tag all too quickly affixed in the hopes of giving a potential listener, wading through the haystack of web-hosted sound, a means to find a glimmer of the familiar. “Glitchstep” is the term Biting Eye (aka Ben Bridges, living in the Yau Tsim Mong district of Hong Kong) applied to his “BoYoDub,” a recently uploaded track to his soundcloud.com/biting-eye page. Not the specific “glitch” or the ubiquitous (to the point of meaningless) “dubstep” but an amalgam. The “glitch,” here a prefix, may relate to the switchy switchy percussion, the way beats, especially during the piece’s strong opening, have a tendency to decay, as if the mere responsibility of metronomic succession is too much for their hair-trigger, short-circuit constitution. The result is beats that push at momentum and then evaporate, appearing again, and again, each appearance more hesitant than the prior, to the extent that they serve a contrary purpose. Rather than imposing order they divulge its futility. As for “step,” it must correlate with the dank downtempo drone that comprises the majority of the tonal material. Don’t read too much into genre; that’s been taken care of.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/biting-eye, which also includes field recordings of Bridges’ neighborhood.
The 17 tracks that comprise Compulse by Skiks are varied enough to come across, collectively, less like an album and more like an expression of the musician’s varied capabilities. These brief sonic items include retro synth heroism (“Emphatic Res”), ecstatic Fourth World shaman techno (“Chamong”), off-kilter MIDI-inflected tunesmithery (“Arnest”), and percussive post-rock (“Tenner Two”). Much of it, as the garbled syllables of various (though not all) titles suggest (“Veeks,” “Xypher”), smacks heavily of Autechre. One highlight is “Birovy,” whose complex piano phrasings bring to mind the proto-post-human endeavors of Conlon Nancarrow and whose spacious canvas suggests the spiritual yearnings of Morton Feldman (
The Resting Bell netlabel’s four-part milestone marker, commemorating its 100th release, comes in the form of a pair of whorl-like compositions. Call them drones if you must, but the patterning is too recursive, too self-digesting, too senses-enveloping to adhere to the standard tenets of stasis suggested by “drone.” The beauty of the drone is that it is both melody and harmony at once, both a horizon-driving force, and a sea-to-sky expanse of haze. The whorl, in contrast, is constant motion disguised as stasis. The distinction is not either/or. Music can have aspects of both, and often does. In fact the most trenchant of the two pieces on the Resting Bell set, the opening track “GrimGrim,” becomes more drone-like as it comes to a close, moving from its shifting centrifugal main body to something sedate and remote (