Disquiet

Mark Browne‘s Malapert and Erratic is an expansive and ambitious project: seven tracks, one over twenty minutes in length, none shorter than six minutes, all with lengthy titles somewhere between a Dickensian subtitle and a Fluxus manifesto, such as “Adjusting the Windows in the Loneliness of My Car so That the Wind Whistles Through at an Ill Defined Pitch and Volume.” But the true mark of the album’s broad goals is the way it mixes such seeming disparate elements as improvisation, jazz, field recordings, and noise into one rich associative endeavor. The strongest track may be the longest, “From the Diaries of the Too Numerous Cursed Poets.” It is a deeply coded narrative of dark intonations and frazzled nerves. Browne’s sound may be abstract, but he isn’t uncomfortable explicating his maneuvers in text. Accompanying the album is a lengthy PDF, with track-by-track notes. This is what Browne says of his “From the Diaries”:

This piece was devised for boiling water, hot fat, synthesizer and sopranino saxophone. This is the second piece I have recorded using this instrumentation and approach and is largely the result of finding the appeal in listening to Noise Music at low volume levels. The piece uses four frying pans initially containing only water. Variation is created by allowing the pans to nearly boil dry, adding and melting fat into the water, and adjusting the gas. The synthesizer uses a touch pad that can be operated using a small stone allowing the saxophone to be played.

Get the full album at linearobsessional.bandcamp.com. It was released by the London-based netlabel linearobsessional.weebly.com. This is the first Linear Obsessional release to be featured on Disquiet.com.

Burble, burble. This is “Finally Sunny,” a nearly four-minute piece by Rawore uploaded to his soundcloud.com/r-37 account. It’s a bubbly, synthesized rhythm, atop which, methodically, a melody of sorts comes into focus. The melody takes the form of occasional tones that move up and down and up again in a manner that suggests a loose, genial structure. What makes the melody especially enjoyable isn’t the tune itself, though it is a lovely fragment of a tune, but instead the manner in which the motion of the tune resembles the ping-ponging percussive effects amid which the steadily bounding tones appear. The blurring of foreground and background is splendid.

For his part, Rawore provides only the slightest of contextual information, a description that clearly suggests its intended readership — true to the workshop nature of so much of SoundCloud — is soleley his fellow musicians: “playing around with audio damage tools. phosphor synth and ronin effect.”

More on Rawore, aka Bob Phillips, at raworeb.blogspot.com.

The songlessness of experimental music is often overstated. Autechre’s distressed digital inventions, for example, gain from their cover art an association with impossible architectures, things that CAD software can imagine but no general contractor could actually build. XYZR_KX of Chicago, aka Jon Monteverde, took the challenge upon himself to transform the turntable-laden, scratch-infused, murky wonderment of “Goz Quarter,” off the 15-year-old Envane EP by Autechre, and turn it into something playable — playable on guitar, no less. His resulting work trades the subsumed hip-hop of the original for something closer to dub, and while hearing the melodyishness of “Goz Quarter” is a pleasure, the real richness of the track is how the dubby environment has the echoed strings and bits of percussion swirling around each other and never … quite … coming … into … sync. By mimicking the song’s melodic path, XYZR_KX has produced a cover; by re-engineering the piece’s inherent complexity, he has produced a tribute.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/xyzr_kx. More on XYZR_KX/Monteverde at xyzrkx.com.