Disquiet

[ June 15, 2008 / bookmark ]

Heavy Rotation: Cliff Martinez’s Latest Score, J. Rawls’s Beat Fusion, DJ Baku’s Overture

What I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:

(1) A Late Winter: First Snow, the Guy Pearce film, came out about a year ago, but Cliff Martinez’s score only saw release last week, at least according to iTunes, which lists the release date as June 10, 2008. The score’s 20 tracks of intimate yet abstract soundscapes, with occasional moments of traditional instrumentation, are of the sort that have earned previous Martinez scores, notably that to Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, a dedicated following. According to iTunes, the record label for the score is YFG Records, LLC. That would be the Yari Film Group, which released First Snow. The film was directed by Mark Fergus, who wrote the screenplay to Children of Men.

(2) Live Beats: A new single by J. Rawls takes one of the great instrumental hip-hop tracks, the backing music to the Beatnuts’s “Off tha Books” (off the 1997 album Street Crazy), and refashions it with sinewy live instrumentation. It’s a jazz fusion hybrid of hip-hop that Rawls has practiced previously, but fortunately none of the slickness that marked his 2006 album The Liquid Crystal Project is heard here. The flipside of the new single pays similar tribute to Da Beatminerz. The tracks are available on a 7″ single (titled “A Tribute to the Beatnuts/ A Tribute to Da Beatminerz”) from Polar Entertainment.

(3) Calm Before the Drums: The recent album Dharma Dance (Popgroup) by Japanese beat figure DJ Baku is a little heavy on the rock’n'roll, a little tight to the 4/4, but the opening track, simply titled “Intro,” elegantly layers street noise, orchestral overtones, and distant piano to rich effect, slowly building over the course of its brief but detailed minute-and-a-half length.

[ February 3, 2008 / bookmark ]

Heavy Rotation: Lou Reed’s Zen Machine, Snöleoparden’s Child’s Play, a sci-fi reprieve, more

What I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:

(1) White Noise, Yoga Heat: The CD showed up in the mail late last year, and on first appearance it seemed like a prank: a collection of four lengthy, meditative drones attributed to Lou Reed, of the Velvet Underground, and released on a small record label. In fact, the album, Hudson River Wind Meditations (Sound True), collects music that Reed has explained he first recorded entirely for himself — “as an adjunct to meditation, T’ai Chi, bodywork, and as music to play in the background of life — to replace the everyday cacophony with new and ordered sounds of an unpredictable nature.” Heard in sequence, “Move Your Heart” has the sing-songy ebb and flow of an everyday drone, rocking back and forth like a small boat, while “Find Your Note” adds ringing tones that suggest a prayer bowl was sourced. Then comes “Hudson River Wind (Blend the Ambiance),” which is comprised of the white noise of field recordings. And then the whole thing closes on “Wind Coda,” which begins with a refrain from “Move Your Heart,” and soon moves to elements from “Find Your Note” and adds in some of the atmospheric material from “Hudson River Wind (Blend the Ambiance).” That last piece serves as a kind of meta-coda, a form of compositional reflection applied to inherently reflective music. More info at soundstrue.com.

(2) A Xylophone’s Spots: It’s true that Snöleoparden’s self-titled album, due for March 3 release on the Rump label, isn’t as inherently electronic as Rump’s usual fare, but with its emphasis on a child’s xylophone and its communal, folk-core vibe, it’s right at home. The opening track, helpfully titled “Nr. 1,” layers sleepytime mallet-work above an increasingly squelchy noisemaker. “Xylofon” is a multitrack wonder, all pointillist glee, like if Steve Reich had written music for Sesame Street; “Lillecykel” employs the same tool set, but toward a more dissonant and quasi-ethnomusicological end. With a nasal whine in the background and cabal of guitars in the foreground, “Water Puppet Theatre” is what T-Rex might sound like if it were still recording today. And those are just a few of the album’s 11 tracks. Snöleoparden is a pseudonym for Jonas Stampe, of the groups Mofus and Badun. More info at rump-recordings.dk.

(3) A Quiet Legend: The great movie-score composer James Newton Howard can fill modern cineplex with the ethereal and the bombastic. Those are his minimal-techno tone poems in Michael Mann’s Collateral and Tony Gilroy’s recent directorial debut, Michael Clayton. But he’s also capable of potting up the orchestral and ethnic percussion, matching the music’s histrionics to the starring actors’s wattage, as he has of late in Blood Diamond, with Leonardo DiCaprio, and I Am Legend, with Will Smith — not to mention the old-school romanticism he’s brought to M. Night Shyamalan’s films. Howard’s scores, like the movies they accompany, have different audiences — and, as the ongoing awards season suggests, different admirers. Tellingly, his Blood Diamond work was nominated for a Grammy, while Clayton is up for an Oscar. Minus the introspection of the latter or the globalization topicality of the former, I Am Legend (Varèse Sarabande) is unlikely to attract many nominations. But fans of Howard’s less volatile scores shouldn’t pass it by. The cue titled “I’m Sorry” strikes the perfect balance between melodic infusion required in a Hollywood blockbuster and the hazy sound design to which the composer seems more naturally inclined. In it, a piano part is echoed and amplified by a string ensemble, each note setting off low-key undulations in the orchestration, and later the piano gives way to an elegiac horn. More info at varesesarabande.com.

(4) Test Tube, Baby: The Disquiet Downstream entry of the past few weeks to which I keep returning most often is the title track off The Door by Multi-Panel (aka Dutch musician Ludo Maas), on the Test Tube netlabel. The song is a mere shimmer of a recording, but it’s lent some texture thanks to a heavily processed vocal sample.(MP3, disquiet.com). More info at monocromatica.com/netlabel.

[ January 6, 2008 / bookmark ]

Heavy Rotation: Japanese jazz, Fahey-esque guitar, Madlib, Splatter, processed vocals

This is what I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:

(1) If it’s possible to imagine a merging of Charles Mingus’s muddy, deeply felt jazz and Morton Feldman’s proto-ambient classical arrangements, this may be it: The track “Itsuki no Komoriuta” off the Fujin Raijin album by the Sakoto Fujii Min-Yoh Ensemble (Les Disques Victo, 2007). While the rest of the set tends toward artful chamber-jazz singed with cacophony, this piece starts with  quiet yet feral cat-like noises from piano and strings and ventures into long tones before rising to a late-in-the-game climax.

(2) Even with the John Fahey-esque guitar runs that constitute such as albums as Sunshrine and O True Believers, the latter spiced with sitar, there was little in introspective guitarist James Blackshaw’s output to necessarily prepare listeners for the Metal Machine Music-quality industrial drone that is “Clouds Collapse” off his excellent recent The Cloud of the Unknowing (Tompkins Square, 2007). (A review last week by nytimes.com’s Jon Pareles, who described “Clouds Collapse” as “the album’s brief textural diversion,” induced me to check it out.)

(3) There’s a sped-up vocal, yeah, on rapper Percee P’s “Watch Your Step,” produced by Madlib (it’s off Percee’s Perseverance album — both single and album on Stones Throw, 2007), and those tweaked whines certainly are de rigueur these days in hip-hop (and, perhaps someday soon, they’ll be déclassé), but it’s how that unnaturally high-pitched voice alternates in the spotlight with some taut, 1970s-style strings that truly distinguishes the track. The result, with its almost swinglessly strict 4/4 beat, is like some sort of industrial Zen soul music. Instrumental available on the 12″.

(4) The track “Glitchfarben” on last year’s Clear the Club (Rastascan, 2007) by the Splatter 3 + N (that’s the Splatter Trip plus guests, including Dave Slusser and Les Paterson) homes in on an unlikely genre-parallel: the sqwonky up’n'around-the-instrument of out-jazz horn playing and the pixel-level randomized noise of so-called “glitch” electronica. The Splatter Trio, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, consists of the multi-instrumentalists Dave Barrett (saxophones, ocarina), Myles Boisen (doubleneck guitar/bass, keyboard, sonics), and Gino Robair (drums, synths, organ, theremin, rhythm guitar).

(5) Last week’s Disquiet Downstream entries were a particularly rich group, including archival Morton Feldman (disquiet.com) and a preliminary sketch of a Leafcutter John track (disquiet.com), but perhaps the most singular piece was a live performance of Vesna Pisarovic’s voice reworked by Roberto Garréton (disquiet.com), posted for free download at dnk-amsterdam.com. For the most of the piece, Garréton’s electronics send the voice through an exhausting exercise course of techniques, from waifish chorale to spectral whisps to data chatter (MP3).

[ April 13, 2004 / bookmark ]

Laptop Busman’s Holiday

DSP Holiday is an aural photo album from a true busman’s holiday: three accomplished electronic musicians holed up together in hotels and studios, doing collaboratively that which they generally do individually and professionally, at home, on their lonesome. HAT (to whom the album is attributed) consists of three men: the H is for Haruomi “Harry” Hosono (veteran of Yellow Magic Orchestra, and an early pop-electronic figure), the A is Atom Heart (born Uwe Schmidt, and so prolific that he maintains an LP crate just for his collection of pseudonyms) and the T is Testu Inoue (an accomplished synthesist and microsounder in his own right). Honoso originally released this seven-track album on his Daisyworld Discs label in the late ’90s, and now Otodisc has re-released it for wider consumption.

The holiday theme apparently inspired the trio, because the record is a collection of off-world cha-chas (”Shinjyuku Photoshop”) and retro-futurist garden-party tunes. A track like “Digidelic” may start off with a fuzzy mash of crossed circuits, but eventually someone flips a switch and a dance beat kicks in, stumbling to remain upright. You can almost here a voice cry, “Hey, who spilled their Mai Tai in my iBook?” but it’s all in good fun. “Malihini Mele” similarly starts in a gray zone, all buzz — but the static soon reveals itself to be nothing other than surf, and then a ukulele (yes, a ukulele) comes into focus. As if embarrassed by their mutual enjoyment, HAT felt it necessary to tag a few minutes of hyper-delicate microsonics onto the end of “Mele,” perhaps to prove to their accountants that they were actually working. But if you hold this jewel box up to your ear, you’ll hear the surf, too.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the autumn 2003 issue of e|i magazine.

[ March 24, 2004 / bookmark ]

Digital Variations on Harp, Guitar, Flute

If the 17-minute A-side of Colin Andrew Sheffield and James Eck Rippie’s Variations (Elevator Bath, 2003) seems to shimmer, credit that scintillation at least in part to the source material: this lengthy ambient piece is apparently built from the sounds of a harp, once the mood-setting instrument of courts and kings. Likewise, the vinyl LP’s cut B1 is built upon a guitar, and B2 upon a flute. The album is a half-hour-plus trio of aural-for-aurality’s-sake ruminations on singular instruments. Sheffield and Rippie dig deep into their raw goods, so even when the instruments are less than recognizable post-production, their core sound — their aural aura — remains present in some form. The tone, if not the technique, sings through: the guitar splayed into slowly ringing sine waves, the harp a crystalline surface extending into the distance.

All of the work on Variations was reportedly recorded live with Sheffield on sampler and Rippie on turntables and guitar. Of the three tracks, the least static of the variations is the one that closes the album, the one based on a flute. There’s much more than a flute in that cut — a wash resembles nearby surf, and there’s a downright eerie granularity at times — but it’s the occasional bit of tentative embouchure that grounds the atmospheric goings-on. The flute track, although eight minutes in length, is listed on the sleeve as an “excerpt,” and one can only imagine where it might have gone had it extended into double digits. The guitar piece, at close to ten minutes, ends quite suddenly, just a whisp and then dead air; perhaps the finality is on purpose, but more than likely it’s single bum moment in an otherwise epiphanic live improvisation. It’s also worth mentioning that the Elevator Bath label, which never skimps in its productions, released the album on heavyweight, 180-gram vinyl.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the autumn 2003 issue of e|i magazine.

[ March 15, 2004 / bookmark ]

Retro Russian Electronica

EU are the somewhat funky side of globalism: two Russian musicians — Ilya Baramiya and Sasha Zaitsev (or Baramia and Zaicev, depending on your transliterator) — with a trunk full of hip-hop and prog rock, and a contract with a record label in Bristol, England (Pause 2). The opening cut on Warm Math, the duo’s second full-length album, opens with the appropriately titled “Retro”: five minutes of the truly old-school — not the lo-fi constructions of early Def Jam hip-hop, but gooey, slow-jam grooves that would have made sense with an R&B team like DeBarge emoting on top. The song’s thick, glossy synth lines won’t sit comfortably with everyone. They may signal down-low, all foreboding and street-wise, but they actually sound more Jolly Rancher than they do DJ Premier, more polished than seasoned. “Gerp” has that slightly goofy quality, exactly what made the X-Files theme song, for all its pop dread, sound like something that director Dario Argento would have used in a horror film back before Ronald Reagan had ever uttered the term “Evil Empire.”

It’s highly unlikely any of this is intended to be campy, even the sci-fi psychedelia of “Said.” The frequent keyboard solos are often mawkish, and the occasional attempts at rhythmic variation are forced (just listen to gears shifting inelegantly through both “Secret Track” and “Eusday”). Perhaps there’s some comfort to be taken in Warm Math; after all the feverish energy of glitch music — all those songs built, like dust mites, from little more than static — it’s nice to hear a sound as thick as your arm. Now, if the histrionics of a band like, say, Goblin (Dawn of the Dead, Profondo Rosso) are your thing, then EU will be a good excuse to get reacquainted with your local import record store.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the autumn 2003 issue of e|i magazine.

[ March 14, 2004 / bookmark ]

Poppy Electronica, Vacation Vibe

Why is it that the most commonplace good-time pop-music elements — for example, a lilting electric-guitar melody and a cliché hip-hop drum loop — can combine to form something almost unbearably delectable? The musician Dim Dim (known to friends and family as Jerry Dimmer) specializes in exactly that sort of home-studio alchemy. And if “Riri,” the opening track to Kiwi (on the Audio Dregs label), is such a spectacular feat of Saturday-morning good cheer, it’s no surprise that the rest of the album can’t quite equal the initial sugar rush. “Riri” has a Carl Stalling goofiness, all “boing!” sound effects once it gets going, plus a consistent Don Ho, Hawaiian-vacation vibe. The song may appear to be mid-tempo, but it has a secret weapon in its feisty backbeat, which will have you attempting a conga line with the nearest carbon-based life form.

The album is packed with tracks that were built from the musical equivalent of Lego bricks: all the pieces are bright, shiny and interchangeable. “Fucha Fucha” has a kid singing along, nursery-rhyme style, with an occasional snippet of elementary scratching. “Flit” brings in more slack-key guitar, and recalls Kid Koala’s way with ambiguously paced vinyl recordings; it’s amazing what a little mechanized backbeat will do to refurbish an old 78. “Los Gitanos” echoes Amon Tobin’s Brazilian fusion escapades. Perhaps the one truly disappointing track on Kiwi comes midway through, in the form of “Frosty.” The song has all the telltale signs of drum’n'bass — dramatic downward modulation, the zippy back-and-forth percussion — but it’s too familiar to be fun. Perhaps Dim Dim’s point is that drum’n'bass is just another kind of party music, one element among many in his cartoony bag of tune tools, but oddly enough it’s the one element here he has not truly made his own.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the autumn 2003 issue of e|i magazine.

[ March 13, 2004 / bookmark ]

Field Recordings from Unreliable Travelog

Philip Scheffner builds art from field recordings that he makes on his travels. A/C (on the Pong label) contains a kind of program music, in which the winding narrative that his sounds accompany is the course of his journey: insect noise, traffic, interior hum. Scheffner is no omniscient narrator; much as he is inclined to fracture and layer the recordings, he also intrudes upon them. When a woman yaps into his microphone, you can hear either him or a travel-mate — Merle Kröger, co-credited for recording A/C’s dialogue — laughing at the absurdity of her hyperbole. “It’s a dead city,” the woman says, as car horns blare repeatedly in the foreground. Even the listener is inclined to giggle at the disparity between what she says and what we’re experiencing, via the proxy of Scheffner’s mic.

There is as much peace on A/C as there is urban anxiety. The music on the album’s third track (there are seven cuts total, ranging in length from a minute to over 11, all untitled) is so patient, the rhythm so seductive, that it girds itself to whatever the listener might be doing. In contrast, track five opens startlingly with car horns and other street noise. “Don’t be so naive,” that same woman tells us, an admonishment in English heavily spiced with an Indian accent. She might be critiquing the assumptions of her arty Western visitors. Or, she might be speaking to the audience, who are accustomed to verses and choruses, and who must make peace with the complexity in Scheffner’s sounds, which are — despite their familiarity — invasive and often grating. At the end of track five, a digitized harmonica fades in, the melody veering toward what sounds like “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (or, perhaps, “God Save the Queen”), and you can’t help but empathize: home feels very far away.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the autumn 2003 issue of e|i magazine.

[ January 31, 2004 / bookmark ]

Art Music for Effete Canines

It’s hard to know what some deep-pocketed audiophiles might make of freq_out, a compilation on Ash International Records of art music seemingly crafted for effete dogs — high-pitched experimental music that was commissioned for, in the immortal phrase of songwriter Gus Kahn, high-tone places. The set’s 12 original tracks feature upper-register sound sculptures by a broad range of contributors (there’s also a 13th ensemble track), including J.G. Thirwell (aka Foetus), taking a break from the more pedestrian sounds of industrial rock, and Brandon LaBelle, among others. The album is an artifact of an installation at a gallery in Copenhagen from June of last year, in which artists were given frequency ranges in which to play around. The results are much more varying than one might imagine, though judging from the cacophony of Jana Winderen’s track, it seems like someone didn’t read the instructions carefully. PerMagnus Lindborg turns in bent tones like thick wind, while LaBelle makes fun, stereophonic, pixilated funk, bouncing little beats back and forth. Thirwell, like Winderen, doesn’t seem to adhere to a particularly narrow frequency range, but the his multi-faceted track, highlighted by chugging ritual music on a miniscule scale, is worth the price of admission on its own. The remainders range from Star Trek special effects to pure immersive sound design. As for those audiophiles in question? Faced with sounds more likely dismissed as errors than readily identified as music, they’d probably freak out.

[ January 31, 2004 / bookmark ]

Two Causes for Francophilia

The compilation Active Suspension vs. Clapping Music, featuring acts from both those two Parisian record labels, is an album to get lost in repeatedly. From futuristic campfire music to robotic hip-hop, from sad and damaged pop songs to self-described “interstellar folk,” its two CDs are just packed with epiphanies, piled high with them, like so many angels doing mass tai chi on the head of a pin. For fans of ambient/electronic music, a wealth of soprano drones are among the richest surprises. My Jazzy Child’s “Barcelona, Something in Mind” is like the lightest, most enchanting Low song recorded, endlessly chanty, with a running hum of tight harmony — like something the Roaches, that wonderful minimalist folk trio, might have recorded had they been mentored by Aphex Twin rather than Robert Fripp. Noak Katoi’s “Aérienne des rêve infinis” likewise takes its steps daintily and solemnly at the same time. It seems impossible to overstate the beauty of those two tracks.

In addition to this music for music’s sake are things more readily identifiable as songs that, nonetheless, fit in well with the refined surroundings — such as the Konki Duet’s “In the Trees,” which has My Jazzy Child’s Roaches feel, with those tangy close harmonies and Renaissance Faire aura; but for all its coy verve, it has this sense of stasis that remains with you long after the track ends. Colleen’s “Good Morning Sunshine” inserts jumbled, reverberating riffs, and its format tantalizes as it veers repeatedly away from song-ness. Domotic’s “Pimmi” goes wide and deep, with a stunningly vibrant field of long tones, unidentifiable sound fragment stretched until they’re translucent. Still, it’s the songless tracks that make the strongest impression, like Shinsei’s “Store bonheur, nue,” which plays light and slow with glitchy elegance, a swath of scintillates like light refracting in mist. Sogar’s “Shinsei amateur remix” puts Shinsei through a blender, revving it up, but never tarnishing its grace. “Pour une flaque” by Davide Balula seems to start where Shinsei ends, making the segue to whispers, backward masking and a simple guitar figure. There’s more here than space allows for praise, but suffice to say that though the album is over a year old at this point, it deserves to be discovered anew.

Balula’s Pellicule is among Active Suspension’s most recent releases, and it is almost as varied as the label’s compilation, Active Suspension vs. Clapping Music, despite being the work of one man and a small handful of friends. Balula’s record has the sound of a folk singer camped out in a bomb shelter, strumming his guitar while the world gently weeps and the computer equipment around him fritzes in and out of working order — his Active Suspension vs. Clapping Music track “Pour une flaque” is heard here, followed by “Lorsqu’il n’est plus,” a track of unspeakable tentativeness, false start after false start; there’s even a montage of lightly treated field recordings, “Viens va-t-en.” The acts of outright Francophone pop, like “Eburn (9V),” the opening track, and “Iris em arco,” start plainly enough, only to have the electonica folded in as time passes, both prime evidence of the artful potential at that intersection of singer-songwriter indie rock and gadgety electronica.