Disquiet

[ March 18, 2010 / bookmark ]

Nostalgic Hungarian Techno (MP3)

The excellent Complementary Distribution netlabel isn’t as prolific as it has been in the past, but a recent EP makes up for lost time with five tracks by four different artists, among them nAsty, Banyek, and NiT Grit, all working broadly speaking in a dubstep vein. The highlight of the record, titled Dubstep Is Fun! Vol. 2, is by tOOk. His is a nearly six-minute piece titled “Honvágy,” which appears to mean homesickness or nostalgia in Hungarian (the label is based in Hungary, though tOOk appears to be in Belgium). The latter definition, nostalgia, fits with the sample of haunting vocals that is the core of the piece. The track opens with the voice all contorted, and when it shows up later, a verbal lamentation heard amid pounding drums and somnolent synths, it’s all the more affecting (MP3).

Get the full release at bitlabrecords.com/cod. More on tOOk, aka Tukács Gábor, at soundcloud.com/took.

[ March 17, 2010 / bookmark ]

Broken Folk from Scott Tuma (MP3s)

When they remake the film Deliverance — and they will, because everything gets remade, whether directly or indirectly — Scott Tuma (long ago guitarist with Souled American) will be hired to do the score. There will be no dueling banjos this time around. There will only be the creaky, meandering, semi-melodic noodling of old coots on a porch, a porch swamped by kudzu and collapsing under its own weight, what weight there is left in those old boards, eaten through as they have been by termites. The old coots’s half-remembered songs will break apart like the distracted thoughts they are, and they’ll be heard, in the film’s score, as mere fragments, muddied by audio effects that simulate the dank environs. That score may exist already in the form of Dandelion, Tuma’s new solo album, three tracks of which have been made available for free download by its releasing label, Digitalis.

There’s “Free Dirt,” which sounds like broken folk music played with equipment purloined from a Superfund industrial site, bent metal, shattered cymbals, and slowly stoked chords making their plaintive case (MP3).

There’s “Hope Jones (Jason’s Song),” which opens with the rough fire of a field recording before moving in and out of sour melodic figures (MP3), a voice appearing occasionally, straining to be heard.

And then there’s “Red Roses for Me,” which at times has the maudlin flavor of a great Pogues song, but works more as a series of self-contained aural segments, including snatches of birdsong (MP3).

More on the release at digitalisindustries.com. More on Tuma at myspace.com/scotttuma.

[ March 16, 2010 / bookmark ]

Madlib’s African Scrapbook (MP3s)

The cunning, big-eared, abstractionist hip-hop producer Madlib has as much Robert Rauschenberg in him as he does Afrika Bambaataa. His works are often sewn from pre-existing material, but he’s less a DJ than he is a die-hard object-oriented composer, forming from pre-existing parts these wide, broad pieces of music that are entirely his own, yet take few if any pains to lose sight of the myriad places from which those individual parts originated. Madlib’s music often has its closest equivalent not in a DJ set, or a mix tape, but in a collage — and his audio collages bring to mind some manner of large-scale cork board, covered with items that overlap each other, ever so slightly, and thus both locate unexpected parallels and highlight under-appreciated details. The resulting assemblage may seem haphazard, but it divulges its logic, and its pleasures, in time.

Madlib’s latest album does double duty, serving both as the third in his planned monthly releases for 2010, a quest he’s called the Madlib Medicine Show, and as his latest under his Beat Konducta series of instrumental hip-hop. Titled Madlib Medicine Show #3: Beat Konducta in Africa, it’s built from countless bits of African recordings, and its sample-layering, beat-limning marvels are hinted at by two free tracks made available by the releasing label, Stones Throw: “The Frontline (Liberation)” (MP3) and “African Voodoo Queen (Drama)” (MP3).

The full album has 37 tracks in all, and on at least one, “Spearthrow for Oh No,” Madlib (born Otis Jackson, Jr.) gives nod to his brother, Oh No (born Michael Jackson), who went to Africa on a virtual crate-digging trip last year, resulting in the excellent collection Ethiopium.

More on the album at stonesthrow.com.

[ March 15, 2010 / bookmark ]

Atmospheric King Crimson MP3

The free downloads at Robert Fripp’s website don’t stay free or downloadable for all that long. The section of rotating MP3s is called “Hot Tickles,” as it’s intended to tickle one’s fancy to purchase full-length archival recordings. Case in point, the recent 1.5-minute soundcheck from King Crimson dating from October 25, 1994. Some of these hot tickles are selected by Alex Mundy, who surveys the vast past audio documentation in Fripp’s holdings, and whose surname has led to two things: first, the inevitable nickname “Stormy,” and second the fact that it’s on each Monday that he posts his glimpses into the archives.

This soundcheck track dates from early recording sessions by the King Crimson “double trio” that eventually yielded the album Thrak. That group consisted of two guitarists (Fripp, Adrian Belew), two bassists (Tony Levin, Trey Gunn), and two percussionists (Bill Bruford, Pat Mastelotto). An extended atmospheric wash (albeit one that comes to a sudden, rapidly scaling end), it’s a good reminder that for all of Crimson’s famed contrapuntal interplay, the band also has a way with sonic textures (MP3).

Visit the Fripp/Crimson site dgmlive.com.

[ March 3, 2010 / bookmark ]

Ambient Procedures in the Light (MP3)

Birmingham, UK-based Mark Harris’s “Duo (The Intension Becomes Masked)” is a bit of ambient procedural music. The procedure in question is quite simple:

The composition is based in a series of eight pitch shifted loop’s of each tone (14 loops). which are then time stretched four times which give us fifty six loops in the piece all running at different times so the composition is in a constant state of flux

The result is a long, still, shifting collection of hushed textures, all interacting in various ways. There is a sense of slowly increasing density and drama, but that may have as much to do with the ear’s need to lend narrative as it does with any compositional strategy on Harris’s part. At 10 minutes in length, it has more than enough space to stretch out in — space in which the listener can get pleasantly lost.

More on Harris at phasestudies.co.uk.

[ March 2, 2010 / bookmark ]

The Controverted Contrabass (MP3)

Michael Bullock does terrible, wonderful things with his contrabass. He rattles its thick, braid-like strings until they come to resemble a cyclone fence doing battle with a ferocious wind. He bows it with a quiet intensity that brings out every fiber of its physical being. He attacks it with alternative materials, leaving the bow aside like so much antiquated performance history. He takes the proud beast of an instrument and uses it to make expressly quiet noises. He takes an instrument capable of deeply sonorous experience, and turns it — mischievously, perhaps, but also concertedly — into a tool for sonic abbrasion.

All of this, and more, is heard in a performance made on February 18 on Rare Frequency, a weekly show at the great Boston radio station WZBC 90.3 FM (MP3).

Original post at rarefrequency.com.

And here’s a video of Bullock performing solo, albeit accompanied by trumpet loops, two nights later at Third Life Studio in Somerville, Massachusetts:

More on Bullock at finenoiseandlight.net.

[ March 1, 2010 / bookmark ]

Bridging Drone & Glitch (MP3)

Writing in brief about his six-plus-minute swath of sound recently uploaded to soundcloud.com/vourtsis, musician Tom Vourtsis described it as “drone/glitch.”

That’s a bit like saying “inside/outside” or “yes/no.” For while drones can be glitchy, and a stream of glitches can suggest a drone-like sound-field, the terms are more a matter of contrasts than of commonalities.

Drones are long held sounds that have the feeling of nearly sub-aural experience. Glitches are the noises that disrupt. Drones are background, glitches foreground. Drones are comfortable, glitches abrasive. Drones are the sound of inaction, glitches of something that’s broken. Drone suggest stasis, glitch crisis.

Which isn’t to criticize Vourtsis. He is correct, and the track is enticing for exactly that reason: the sounds are contrasting, but not incompatible. The glitches are eventually subsumed in “Brown,” as the track is named, but it’s certainly not clear from the start which element will be the victor. The opening drone is like some distant port noise, the sound of ships passing in the fog-muddied night. And then the slow wax and wane of the fog-sound gives way to Morse-code blips; the track moves from business-as-usual to urgency. In time the urgency fades, and the disruptive audio relaxes back into a drone, but even as it comes to a close, it bears the hint of continued threat: the glitch on the horizon.

More on Vourtsis at soundcloud.com/vourtsis and at radioamor.tumblr.com.