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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The song is titled “Machine Gun,” the album Split the Atom. Tobin, true to form, extracts spare elements from the original and refashions them into his own piece — in the process, he takes the original and makes it considerably more abstract, largely ditching the club-friendly beat, and along with it various pop flourishes. His revision is also about half a minute longer that the song from which it’s derived.

Noisia’s “Machine Gun” sounds a bit like if Daft Punk did the theme song for a James Bond movie. I can’t link to streaming audio of Tobin’s expert reassembly, because you have to go through this whole registration rigmarole to get the MP3, but it’s worth it (in part because the registration process allows you to opt out of future emails). The track’s online through March 8 at noisia.nl/free-download.

The original version can be heard in this video:

Noisia are Nik Roos, Martijn van Sonderen, and Thijs de Vlieger; more on them and the free MP3 at noisia.nl. More on Tobin at amontobin.com.

Appropriately titled “Bleakscape,” the track is a lightly meandering, slowly circulating drone that doesn’t so much progress linearly as seap outward as time progresses. It could be the sound of an infant’s crib-mobile slowed to an extreme. It could be the score to a planetarium installation, each newly introduced sound timed to the appearance of a star.

Throughout, this undercurrent of tension, a tremulous if distant rumbling, is set against the glints that comprise the most prominent aspects of the composition. It’s quite a lovely thing, overall, in particular how the various different elements change how your ear perceives the work’s pacing.

Hoist is Boston, Massachusetts–based Charlie Hoistman.

The electronically enhanced, endlessly looping cello of Ted Laderas, aka Ooray, makes regular appearances as part of the Disquiet Downstream series of recommended MP3s. His latest, “Marzo,” makes a somewhat surprising but nonetheless welcome departure from his by now formalized approach to thick, reverb-drenched walls of cello-derived sound, which often come to take the appearance of massive, improvised clouds of music.

“Marzo,” by contrast, feels fully composed, in part because the layering of cello never gets to that point where you can’t see the trees, only the forest, and also because it introduces a steady rhythm, which Laderas says he got by “beating the strings with the wood part of the bow.”

Original track at soundcloud.com/ooray. More on Ooray/Laderas at 15people.net, from which the above photo is borrowed.

Jacob Newman makes his modest home on the web at capturedspace.org, and the phrase is an apt one for his sounds. As previously heard here last year in a collection of works based on the Buddha Machine (disquiet.com), the straightforwardly titled Buddha Machine, Newman has a penchant for meditative sounds that are magnificently still and contemplative. His No Midpoint to Infinity, which was released last November, doesn’t veer from that course. And as with Buddha Machine, Midpoint’s conceptual core is a procedural one; it takes a single sound generator as its source, in this case a Fender Precision bass.

Though it’s exceedingly brief, the album’s open track (“Elusive,” MP3), at under a minute, may be its strongest moment — in retrospect, with knowledge of the bass, you can hear in it string-like features, such as plucking and slow strumming, but it’s more than anything a glorious shot of ambience, given depth with an echoing effect that suggests an impossibly large, and impossibly quiet, orchestra.

Full album at archive.org, where it is housed, and at the releasing netlabel, earthmantra.com.

And then a bell rings. And we’ve started anew. The remainder of the album’s four tracks are really what Hart’s up to. That opening bit wakes you up, so he can settle you back down. That bell is the start of “Emporia,” which employs a small amount of feedback amid layers of vocals, twisted like a modern take on an old Beatles ploy, in which syllables are tweaked just beyond the possibility of comprehension. The difference here is, the actual vocal is never heard, just the ghost sound of vowels turned this way and that, like a half-remembered song (MP3).

“Colors That Surround You” confirms the somewhat retro mode with a keyboard that’s reminiscent of a Rhodes piano, though it’s filtered through just enough glitchy effects to keep it modern (MP3). “Kontakt” again uses as its main sonic material small pieces of warped vocals, but they’re slightly less mellifluous, and more block-like, than in “Emporia”; the seams between these snippets provide a kind of quietly chaotic rhythm (MP3).

And for an album this compositionally circumspect and self-knowledgeable, it’s no surprise that the closing track would provide a coda. That track is “Wilderness of the City,” in which a slow industrial rhythm, less a beat than a groove of contorted metal, brings to mind the opening noise-making of “When Someone Loves You No More.” And perhaps to make a point about the relative properties of discomfort, far more unsettling is the way a cello slips out of tune, and the way a guitar scrapes like a butcher sharpening his tools, and the way those little vocal snippets continue, claustrophobically, to fail to get out much more than a breath (MP3).

In the end, the album’s title may be less a recommendation than a challenge.

Full release at the netlabel restingbell.net. More on Hart, who’s based in Washington, Illinois, at myspace.com/derrickhartmusic.