Disquiet

[ September 28, 2008 / bookmark ]

Heavy Rotation: Holmes’s Pop, Chop Shop’s Ruins, People Under the Stairs, “St. James Infirmary”

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

(1) Holmes Between Features: There’s a whole lotta pop on The Holy Pictures, the new full-length from David Holmes, the DJ better known as the composer of scores for films, many of them by Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight, the Ocean’s trio). For example, both the album’s title cut and its “I Heard Wonders,” the latter of which opens the set, could be some dopey post-Bauhaus, pre-My Bloody Valentine lushness. That depiction holds also for the instrumental stuff on Pictures, like the upbeat, ’80s kick of “Melanie.” Fans of his scores will take comfort in the more atmospheric instrumentals, cuts like “The Ballad of Sarah and Jack,” “Hey Maggy,” and “Theme/I.M.C.” — all of them are heavy on melody, but are still more savory than sugary. And then there’s one truly serious expanse of sound design: “Birth,” Holy Pictures’s penultimate cut, a thrillingly slow run of tide-pool placidity that briefly rouses itself, as if reflecting some brilliant object flying overhead.

(2) Rust Never Sleeps, the Remix: The Oxide that serves as the title to the recent album by Chop Shop, on the 23five label, is no figment, no metaphor, no mere familiar nod to natural, organic dissolution in our age of cold, digital meditation. It’s all too real, this oxidation. The title refers to the “damage. decay. loss.” — as the brief liner note puts it — that came to an archive of old audio tape belonging to Chop Shop, a pseudonym of sound artist Scott Konzelmann. To rectify the destruction by accident, time, and neglect, Konzelmann dove into the ruins of his archive, not to reconstruct the original material (it wasn’t, one imagines, salvageable) but to appreciate those ruins in their own right and on their own terms. The result is a CD consisting of one single track, divided into distinct segments of droning, noisy static that are the true sound of audio damage. There is white noise that sounds like the gaping maw of some malevolent spirit, and wisps of ether that are as soothing as an afternoon breeze. The lesson is clear, the passing of time brings both sorrow and comfort. That the album progresses from the desolate to the refined, from noise to quietude, suggests that Konzelmann has made peace with his loss. If nothing else, it has proven, as a result of this stark recording, to be our gain.

(3) Old Time Beats: Just last week (disquiet.com), the new Metallica album, Death Magnetic, had me dreaming that producer Rick Rubin, fresh from time-warping the famed metal band back to its potent mid-1980s style, would next turn to the Beastie Boys, unwind countless hours spent jamming in skate rinks, and re-produce them circa the tape-looped, sample-mad antics of that same period — for reference, their debut album, Licensed to Ill, hit in 1986, same year a Metallica’s Master of Puppets, and two after Metallica’s Ride the Lightning. So-called underground, or “backpacker,” hip-hop has kept alive the groove of that period (and the slightly later, early-1990s sounds of Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and their ilk), but Metallica’s backward glance proves that you can go home again — not just to the vibe of an era, but to its techniques. For Metallica, that means breakneck rhythms, as well as instrumental excursions that aren’t verse, chorus, bridge, or jam — think of them as music’s fifth constituent part, its umami. The equivalent for the Beastie Boys and other hip-hop pioneers of that time (from the pop of LL Cool J to the agitprop of Public Enemy) is the taut, noisy quality of fetishized sound objects.

In last Sunday’s New York Times, Jon Caramanica’s “The Mining of Hip-Hop’s Golden Age” covered a slew of newer bands aping the old sound (nytimes.com), and lo and behold the vibrant new album from People Under the Stairs (not covered in Caramanica’s piece, which focused on New York), Fun-DMC, due out this coming Tuesday, September 30, is a veritable grab bag of true old-school rap entertainment. Which is to say, underlying it all are tracks built from short samples, repeated with an ear for the trance-like effect of the riff equivalent of a bon mot. Two of those instrumentals have been available for a month, thanks to a 12″ of Fun-DMC’s “Step Bacc” and “The Wiz.” The former is the real keeper, from its wood-block knock of an opening, through its phased chanting, and those generous sluices of rhythm guitar. But there’s far more where that came from. Fun-DMC packs 20 cuts, so here’s to more 12″s.

(4) Downstream Coded Jazz: This week’s top Disquiet Downstream entry is the reworking of the classic jazz piece “St. James Infirmary” by San Francisco-based programmer and art gallery proprietor Christopher Abad, aka Aempirei (MP3, disquiet.com).

[ September 21, 2008 / bookmark ]

Heavy Rotation: Jeck’s LPs, Aceyalone v. Automaton, ‘Anathem,’ Metallica v. Itself

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

(1) The seven tracks on Sand (Touch) by Philip Jeck were recorded live, but what the music consists of is all pre-recorded. These are no mere mash-ups, mind you. Jeck is about as far from the kaleidoscopic party music of a Girl Talk or a DJ Z-Trip as a DJ could find himself. The layers of music on Sand, as in much of Jeck’s work, are the result of atmospheric loops of manipulated turntables. Be sure to check out the ecstatic “Fanfares,” in which clips of orchestral grandeur (reportedly sourced from Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”) echo into the distance as the reverberations gather enough richness to overcome the evident record scratches. Also worth spending time immersed in is the album’s “Residue,” a rice-paper-thin extension of light crackles and nearly sub-aural drones, with occasional, scene-changing alterations in volume and density.

(2) In our age of malleable media, listening habits can, at times, be less like playlists and more like recipes. Right now, my favorite recipe is as follows: the instrumental track of rapper Aceyalone’s (aka Eddie Hayes of Freestyle Fellowship) “To the Top” (a single from last year, backed with “Jungle Muzik”), its naked Bo Diddley beat dropped to 70bpm, run through the Automaton plug-in (from the folks at Audio Damage) via Ableton Live, with Automaton’s Replicate function picking up random segments, glitching ‘em all to hell, and repeating them at unexpected intervals atop the original.

(3) The Disquiet Downstream of last week is the snippet of faux-ecclesiastic acapella composed by David Stutz to accompany Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem (MP3, disquiet.com). Just beautiful voices tracing geometrical abstractions on the blackboard between your ears. I’m 300 pages into the book at the moment.

(4) A little off topic, Metallica’s Death Magnetic is, easily, the band’s best album since 1991, when Metallica (aka “the black one,” aka “the one with ‘Enter Sandman,’” metal’s closest approximation of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which Nirvana released barely a month later) hit stores. It isn’t just the return to Ride the Lightning-era riffs, thanks to judicious production by Rick Rubin, that makes the album. It’s that those riffs are often the majority of a given song, meaning Metallica has put the straightforward pop structures of Load, ReLoad, and St. Anger behind them. On Death Magnetic, which opens with a heartbeat reminiscent of … And Justice for All’s “One,” those riffs churn with a bare-bones aggression, which means that rock’s equivalent to grinding gears are, for the moment, a mainstream sound. Yes, it would be great to hear more of Earth/Sunn O)))’s drone-metal in Metallica, and maybe some touches of Godflesh/Drumcorp-style digitally chopped’n’screwed beats, but simply for having taken the band back in time, Rubin has secured Metallica’s future. (Maybe we’ll be treated to some remixes?) I was in LAX a year or so ago, my plane delayed, and while wandering the mostly deserted halls, I ran into, of all people, Metallica’s lead singer, James Hetfield. I’d interviewed the band’s loquacious drummer, Lars Ulrich, on several occasions, but had never spoken with Hetfield before. I approached him, and he eagerly joined in conversation about working with Rubin (production was already well under way, and Rubin’s involvement was pubic knowledge). When I mentioned the great work Rubin had done with Slayer and Johnny Cash, Hetfield’s agreement was clear, but when I mentioned his then recent work with Neal Diamond, something changed, and he sort of closed down. The conversation was over. At the time, I figured that he took offense at being reminded that Rubin had resuscitated the reputation of the 1960s and ’70s singer’s recording career, as if Metallica had anything in common with that lovably cornball folk-pop — or he took it as a suggestion that Metallica needed something approaching resuscitation, which it did. But now it’s clear that Rubin did exactly the same thing with Metallica he’d done with Diamond and with Cash: located the place deep in the back catalog when the music still mattered, and then convinced the musicians to meet him there. (Maybe he can revisit the Beastie Boys now, and re-awaken the true old-school, tape-loop-based hip-hop production?)

[ September 7, 2008 / bookmark ]

Heavy Rotation: Byrne’s ‘Hymnal,’ Fehlmann’s Sidetrips, Akrobatik’s Blueprint

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

Thomas Fehlmann’s self-deflatingly titled Visions of Blah (Kompakt) is about half standard-issue, if masterfully textured, techno: all loungey backbeats and gentle grooves. But then there are the surprises, like the churning, gurgling, dastardly noise of “Rainbow Over Stadtautobahn” and the almost embarrassingly lush “Boheme Rouge,” on which layers upon layers of string samples, all as substantial as cotton candy but without a hint of sugar, summon up a cloud of epic proportions (save for density, which approaches zero), just in time for Fehlmann to undercut the elegant ether with an increasingly prevalent series of glitchy interruptions, which changes the whole tenor of the piece. Those two tracks alone are worth the price of entry.

In advance of his Absolute Value (Fat Beats) album, under-appreciated rapper Akrobatic released an eight-song Absolute taster EP — four tracks off the 14-song Absolute Value, along with their underlying instrumentals, each of which is a superb slice of studio-honed funk. Though each of the four are by different producers — “Be Prepared” (9th Wonder), “A to the K” (Illmind), “Put Ya Stamp On It” (the late J Dilla), “Beast Mode” (DJ Fakts One) — they share enough interests to make them work as a whole, including a rigorous emphasis on stripped-bare production and the employment of strings and old-school samples. “A to the K” has the heaviest bass line of the batch, and along with it some moody orchestration out of a blaxploitation epic. “Be Prepared” uses a warped r&b moan as its hook, to fun effect. “Beast Mode” is admirably monocular, just this ominously heavy beat, lightened with a bit of syncopation, a kind of considered response to the momentum of NERD.’s hit “She Wants to Move.” And the true keeper is Dilla’s “Put Ya Stamp On It,” which pushes tightly wound strings, all plucked and sawed, against lickety split drums; if a contemporary music ensemble like So Percussion or Alarm Will Sound were to do a hip-hop covers album, this is what it would sound like.

Former Talking Head lead singer David Byrne is busier than ever — with his musical building in lower Manhattan having just come to a close (davidbyrne.com/art, nymag.com), his full-length collaboration with Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, out in stores and online (everythingthathappens.com), a solo tour underway focused on their various past tandem endeavors, and numerous other projects including one of the strongest BbFPs (blogs by famous people) on the Internet (journal.davidbyrne.com). On top of it all — or, given the limited attention it has received, perhaps buried by it all — he also scores the HBO TV series Big Love, for which he was an inspired choice given his fascination with, to borrow the title of one of the cues from Big Love, “Exquisite Whiteness.” Much of the music on Big Love: Hymnal (Todo Mundo) is a sort of pastoral melodrama, appropriate to the show, which focuses on a polygamist family trying to make it in the “real world,” beyond their ancestral compound. There’s stately piano (”Language Confounded”), horn ensembles (”The Breastplate of Righteousness”), his own voice (unmistakable, and heard as a chorus element on various tracks, as well as in full pop-song mode on the closing “Blue Hawaii”), and a healthy amount of xylophones and the like throughout. At times, the score hints at the relative complexity of his old Knee Plays work, but these cues are especially notable for their poise, the varied instrumentation, and a whimsical mix of genre elements. It’s a kind of Middle American exotica

[ September 1, 2008 / bookmark ]

GoGooo’s Shoebox Miscellany: ‘Long, lointain’ (Baskaru, 2007)

The sonic raw materials with which Gabriel Hernandez constructed his album Long, lointain probably wouldn’t fill a shoebox. Hernandez, who makes music under the name GoGooo, built each of the album’s 10 tracks from what essentially amounts to a shared set of related sounds: bell and organ tones, natural and urban field recordings, quiet singing, and overheard voices. And like any other meaningful keepsake, it’s a shoebox that listeners will learn to cherish.

The tracks balance those elements to varying degrees of emphasis, some heavy on song, others heavy on sound. On several, the raw noise captured by Hernandez’s microphone is left virtually unmediated. That’s the case with two that appear close to the end of Long, lointain: “Lueur,” which could be pebbles mixed by hand in a wet slurry, and “Là,” in which raindrops are eventually joined by hand bells (or, perhaps, wind chimes). Those bells are the distinguishing factor between the two tracks, for in “Là” the bells introduce a melodic component, if not a proper melody, whereas “Lueur” is pure field recording. In “Là” the bells strike the ear as music, all the more so because the field recording part of the piece eventually fades and the bells are, briefly at the track’s end, revealed as a separate audio layer, a matter of subtle artifice. The same method informs a track titled “Calme,” in which noises similar to those in “Lueur” are joined late in the work by a slowly played harmonica; it’s an injection of melody that is all the more arresting because it fails to resolve, fails to return to its root note, before “Calme” ends.

Long, lointain, released late in 2007 on the French label Baskaru, is a small masterpiece of such elegant maneuverings between the natural world and composed sound. Consider for the sake of contrast the two tracks on Long, lointain furthest from “Lueur” and “Là” along the spectrum from sound to song: “Prés de L’arbe” and “Partir Loin.” The former opens with a tune strummed and plucked on an acoustic guitar. That guitar line distinguishes it from the rest of the album. The finger-picking is something one might expect not from a sound artist like Hernandez but from some singer-songwriter — except for two things: first, the detail of the recording focuses on the texture of the strings to a fetishistic degree, aligning it with the high fidelity of the field recordings, and second, as the piece proceeds small echoes extend and enhance the guitar playing, making it feel epic despite its meager dimensions. The piece is somehow, at once, as peaceful as a John Fahey koan and as anthemic as a U2 song. After a brief bridge passage of field noise, the guitar returns transformed, the texture amplified, the plectrum activity layered until it achieves a gentle noise.

“Partir Loin,” despite the rough sounds and birdsong with which it opens, is the closest thing to a proper song on the album. It serves as a kind of reward, or dessert, coming as it does at the end of the record. Played out like an introspective organ solo, it’s enlivened by occasional bell tones and small touches of field recordings. In its closing moments, which is to say in the closing moments of the album, those real-world noises rise to the fore, reminding the listener of the variety of materials that were heard earlier.

The remainder of Long, lointain falls somewhere between those two types of music, between the framed field recording and the gestural song. The album opens with “Derrière,” its initial ring — like a call for worship or a ritual in advance of meditation — soon sharing audio-space with lulling swells. “Echappée” dives deeper into belltone, swirling in ghostly noises. “Je Ne Te Vois Plus” has the rough toil of those “Lueur,” mixed with more of those gently swaying bells; the real-world sounds seem more magnified here than elsewhere on the album, yielding a hyperreal experience, the way a hair can look like a snake when plucked from context. “Les Nuages Flottent” is a solo organ piece, performed as if the organist is stuck inside a church while the rain, heard just outside, keeps him from leaving. “Affleurement” returns to the guitar of “Prés de L’arbe” but applies a fair amount of digital effects, extending the tones with a ripe artificiality, which is set in contrast to a clock-tick backing beat and the voices of children at play; the use of the kids’s voices here, and of labor elsewhere on Long, lointain, bring to mind Bob Ostertag’s early work at remixing field recordings, Sooner or Later.

I rarely — which is to say, probably not frequently enough — note who masters a recording, but it’s difficult not to connect the meticulous detail of Long, lointain, along with its avant-folk feel, with the fact that the album was mastered by Greg Davis, who achieved a foundation of rural ambience on such albums as Arbor and Somnia.

More on Hernandez/GoGooo at gogooo.free.fr and on the Baskaru label at baskaru.com.

[ September 1, 2008 / bookmark ]

David Holmes’s Score to ‘The War Within’

Finally had a chance to watch The War Within, to which I was looking forward primarily because its score is credited to the Free Association, a group of musicians working in cahoots with DJ and composer David Holmes. Holmes is an occasional Steven Soderbergh collaborator, most notably as creator of the scores to Out of Sight (1998) and the three Ocean’s movies (2001, 2004, 2007), and he’s also done excellent work on such films as Code 46 (2003) and Stander (2003), both of which emphasized his interest in 1970s soul grooves and, as time has passed, an increasingly light touch.

Holmes’s score for The War Within, which was released in 2005, is among his least visceral, most airy work yet. The majority of it is soft rhythms and quiet patterns, many reverberating from electric guitar above touches of ethnic percussion and tremulous strings. Suffice to say, Holmes has come a long way from the spirit of the title of his debut album release, This Film’s Crap Let’s Slash the Seats (1995), which projected his cinematic aspirations, collecting genre slices of aggressive, largely instrumental electronica, with distinct reference points to drum’n'bass, hip-hop, and techno. In a quick decade, though, he’s gone from digital-punk upstart to big-screen introvert — in film terms, from Guy Ritchie to Terence Davies. It’s been a welcome maturation to observe, and none of this praise is intended to suggest the fire in his belly has dimmed, or that he couldn’t still make some serious noise when a film, or an audience, demanded it.

The War Within, directed by Joseph Castelo (An American Saint), who co-wrote it with its lead actor, Ayad Akhtar, tells the story of a would-be suicide bomber who rooms with an old friend after his planned attack on Manhattan is, at the last minute, called off. Suddenly ensconced in a tight family situation, the terrorist-in-hiding wrestles with his mission amid sweat-inducing flashbacks to torture sequences. If most of the film concerns itself with rumination and memory, so too does most of the score emphasize moments of mental reflection. Holmes’s music emphasizes backward masking, distant echoes, and druggy low-slung bass lines, and many of the brief cues (there are 28 of them on the CD, ranging in length from half a minute to just under four) often have the water-in-ear effect that, in film settings, signifies disorientation.

Music rarely plays under conversation in The War Within. More often it leads up to, or trails away from, action. I can only think of one instance when a specific cue signaled specific activity on the screen, and that’s toward the end of the film when the sister of the main character’s friend recognizes an object (I’m wording this to avoid a spoiler) — and even then, the action the music accompanies isn’t her taking possession of the object, so much as it is her recognizing the object’s consequence.

Though there is no commercially available release of The War Within score, digital copies were reportedly made available as a promotional free download by the film’s adventurous production company, HDNet. I received my copy on CD (pictured above) from the production company around the time of the film’s release. More details on the film at warwithinmovie.com and hdnetfilms.com.

[ 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.