Disquiet

[ February 22, 2010 / bookmark ]

Dreamtime Vocal Play (MP3s)

Derrick Hart may have titled his recent five-song EP Fall Asleep to This, but it starts with a short, sharp, seriously pulse-quickening bang. The album opens with an abrasive bit of noise-making (“When Someone Loves You No More,” MP3). At a total of 23 seconds, it’s harsh and loud and startling enough to get your heart beating, and it sets up the rest of the record to provide the solace inherent in the title. Considering what follows, that bracing salvo is more ear- and palette-cleanser than anything else. It comes to a boil quickly, running hard and metallic like blood in a cyborg’s ears — as such, it’s reminiscent of Lou Reed’s classic Metal Machine Music, a hard-Zen approach to ferocity that at once suggests active violence and something frozen still.

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.

[ February 19, 2010 / bookmark ]

Early-1990s Glitch (MP3)

Another treasure from ubu.com: the 1993 album by Bernhard Günter, Un Peu de Neige Salie. Well, four of the original album’s five tracks, judging by various discographic reference sources. Günter is a major micro-sonicist, and these tracks exemplify his detail-oriented approach, even if one of them is, by his own explanation, a real career anomaly. It is also a very early example of glitch, the sound of microscopic error, a sound that was arguably to then-nascent electronic music what the blue note was to jazz.

The piece is the one with which the album opens, “Untitled I/92″; it is, in its composer’s own words, “the only work using synthesized sounds I have ever released” (MP3).

And it’s not just for historical reasons that the track is required listening. It is metronomically glitchy, drawing the ear in with ever so minute sounds. These little aural pin pricks set down the barest of rhythms, only to be upset by sudden shuddering — even giving in, somehow being subsumed by, a sound that by all measure save experience is even tinier still. It’s a high-pitched, dogs-worst-friend whine that’s filament thin and all the more compelling, attention-grabbing, for its near-non-existence. In the end, it’s like some figment particle fixated on by a sleep-deprived physicist.

Get the full set at ubu.com. More on Günter at myspace.com/bernhardguenter.

[ February 18, 2010 / bookmark ]

WHY?Arcka’s 26th and Final Arckatron Exhibits MP3

Major congrats to Philly-based outward-bound hip-hop and soul-cutup producer WHY?Arcka, aka Shawn Kelly, who has completed his 26-track series of free downloads, Exhibits A – Z, which he launched last year at arckatron.bandcamp.com.

Each entry in the Exhibits series takes a few brief snippets of familiar songs and creates something new out of these little bits of horns and voice, drums and strings, beats and bass. He’s chosen to close the run with “IHT/Goodbye,” a tribute to Black Moses himself, Isaac Hayes:

The track invents a heavy back beat where there wasn’t one, and introduces a funky counterpoint by layering and juxtaposing material that was originally heard in an entirely different sequence. Not short on aspirations himself, Kelly pays tribute to Hayes’s affection for suites by cutting short the track close to the end and taking it an entirely different, loungey, downtempo direction.

Track originally posted at arckatron.bandcamp.com. Again, congrats to WHY?Arcka. Can’t wait to hear what he comes up with next.

[ February 17, 2010 / bookmark ]

Bulgarian-tinged British Instrumental Hip-Hop (MP3s)

Back in the heady days of fusion, and later on repeat during the heights of acid-jazz, texture was perhaps the discernible feature distinguishing depth from froth. The rough, saliva-tinged exaltations of Miles Davis kept his electric-era work grounded — in contrast with the high-tone lounge music of his third-generation descendants. On the fifth and penultimate track of Innereyefull’s EP of hip-hop-derived instrumentals, Blunted Soul, “Kickin Back,” a light bit of vinyl noise opens the track. What follows is a solid groove that edges into psychedelia, slowing the head to a nod, an echoed vocal sample occasionally punctuating the molasses-mode tempo. What makes the track stand out from the collection is how that surface noise comes to serve as part of the rhythm, part of what proves to be an especially addictive downtempo shuffle (MP3).

Likewise “Flipside,” with which the album closes — here it’s a horn, the standard signifier of jazz, that is the source of the track’s distinction. The horn is melodious, but warped, a slightly sour effect that finds a tasty parallel between the effect of a mute and of a slowed turntable (MP3)

Get the full release at dustedwax.org. More on Innereyefull, aka British musician Andy Kent, at myspace.com/innereyefulls. More on Bulgarian musician Dimitar Kalinov, aka Violent Public Disorderaz, who guests on “Flipside,” at myspace.com/violentpublicdisorderaz.

[ February 16, 2010 / bookmark ]

Ambient-Leaning Post-Rock, or Vice Versa

The Unrecognizable Now have, of late, been up to their ambient-leaning, post-rock tricks (or perhaps it’s post-rock–leaning, ambient tricks) in a recording studio, and are sharing some of what they’ve come up with. A recent track, posted an Unrec member Marc Fischer’s unrecnow.com/dust blog, is five-plus minutes of what could be an early Terry Riley exploration of oceanic rhythms or, in more contemporary terms, a Tortoise practice in dronescaping (MP3). Despite the willfully fluid format of the music, there is a compositional quality to it, how nodes of harmonic specificity come to overlap, and how little rifflets suggest development that has aspirations to be as melodic as it is tonal.

More on the duo of Fischer and his partner, Matt Jones, who perform as Unrecognizable Now with live visuals by Rob Tyler, at myspace.com/unrecognizablenow, and at unrecnow.com, from which the below image is borrowed.

[ February 15, 2010 / bookmark ]

Brazilian Electronic Music, Circa 1970 (MP3s)

Funky glitches? Check. Latin American vibe? Check. Found-sound texture? Check.

Dateline circa 1970? Now, hold on a second.

Welcome to the sound world of Brazilian composer Jorge Antunes (born in Rio de Janeiro, 1942), three tracks of whose music were recently made freely available at that Area 51 of avant-garde culture, ubu.com.

The collection is titled Musica Eletronica, and the tracks range from gurgling effects (“Cinta Cita,” MP3) to a mix of heavily treated vocals and a wind-up turntable (“Auto Retrato,” MP3) to abstract stereo noise (“Para Nacer Aqui,” MP3). It’s a minute or so into “Auto Retrato” when a very contemporary mix of archival sound and downtempo beat kick in; DJ Kid Koala wasn’t even born when this was recorded.

According to liner notes posted separately at mutant-sounds.blogspot.com, “Cinta Cita” means “meeting with the tape,” which explains its rigorous surface-level attention. The post also clarifies the content of “Auto Retrato” (full title: “Autro-Retrato Sobre Paisaje Porteño”), noting that the tango heard on the piece is by Francisco Canaro (toward the end, a pause-tape approach lets a baby’s crying punctuate a dramatic orchestral ending).

More on Antunes at jorgeantunes.com.br. The above photo is from another great Antunes source, americasnet.com.br. The image reportedly shows Antunes in 1970 at the Laboratório de Música Eletrônica do Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires.

[ February 11, 2010 / bookmark ]

Japanese Turntablism Blowout (MP3)

Japan isn’t just the home to some of the world’s best turntables. It is also, by no small coincidence, home to some of the best turntablists. The great website turntableradio.com has been celebrating this natural national direct-drive resource with a series of live performances, most recently a massive jam session featuring a who’s who of Japanese dual-deck activity (notable exceptions including DJs Krush and Honda, certainly). The participants this time around were seven different performers: Ken One, Naoki, Ichiro, DJ Duct, DJ Keita, Audace (who also played guitar), and XLII (who brought along a laptop). The set is just tremendous, mixing hip-hop and electronica, jazz samples and scratching, with more than enough prowess to cement the reputations of the participants, but none of that veering into showmanship, or risking overpowering the music (MP3).

The two previous entries in this series focused on Ken One (turntableradio.com) and Naoki (turntableradio.com). There appears to be at least one additional entry scheduled.