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Saiph‘s Diffusion limns that space where electronic drone and classical orchestration meet. There is no doubt, in “Einsames Element” (MP3), that those are, indeed, tremulous strings amid the woodsy percussion, even if the strings are playing a role more likely to be handed to a synthesizer these days. And even on repeat listen, the knowledge [...]
All it requires is a bit of repetition and a little echo to take a diva — all that throaty virtuosity, all that institutional training, all that inherited performance technique — and turn her into one element among many. The Russian musician Clapan (né Denis Korsunski) accomplishes just that early along in an hour-long live [...]
When does a field recording of sound constitute a performance? Perhaps when the field — that is, perhaps when the environment in which the sound itself occurred — serves a role that might be likened to that of a traditional instrument. Phillip Wilkerson posted a recent recording of just such an instance, that of a [...]
To listen to Beacon Radio by Rykard is to wonder if your Internet browser has multiple tabs or windows emitting audio simultaneously. Not a single track goes by without some incongruous melange occurring — such as the remote megaphones and clangy percussion of “Sulphuric Arqived,” or the canine grunts and distended orchestrations of “Orchids,” not [...]
A car honks twice, and then what follows is an inundation of descriptions of a grisly automobile accident that has taken the life of a loved one, as well as of the detached bystanders who snap mobile-phone pictures of the splattered corpse. A rector talks at length about the intense, the unknowably demanding, emotional requisites [...]
That’s not how the rules are supposed to work, right? If you’re combining natural sounds and electronic ones, there’s an inherent contrast, the noisy chaos of the “real” world set alongisde the considered organization of the “constructed” one. The real world is the one outside our doors. The constructed one is the one inside our [...]
Beat-driven instrumental electronica often builds as it goes along — following a disorienting bit of opening noise, there’s a rhythm track, then some half-broken sound that’s treated like a lead instrument, then a sinuous unknowable that adds flesh to the bones, then variations on that sequence, one after another, perhaps one or another dropping out, [...]