There is DJ’ing, and then there is turntablism. The former lends context to existing music by putting pre-recorded sounds into a sequence, sometimes locating parallels through the creative use of layering. The latter takes the medium itself as its subject, working with familiar tools but often driving into abstract territory that provides a unique vantage [...]
“Le Menu Gastrophonique” is a series of podcasts recorded in and about kitchens. The concern of “Gastrophonique” is, according to its recordists, “the sounds of food, digestion, excretion.” Produced by Coraline Janvier, there have been 10 episodes thus far, though only the first two appear to have popped up on the Resonance FM RSS feed [...]
The name Kalte is utilized by two Toronto-based musicians, Deane Hughes and Rik MacLean, who traffic in dramatic electronic sounds. Their album The Lanthanide Series, from the excellent Stasisfield netlabel, collects five instrumental tracks that are quite distinct from each other, including the opening drone of “Shallow Approach” (MP3) and the swaying noise of “Bremsstrahlung” [...]
To celebrate the newly launched Large Hadron Collider — i.e., the massive scientific experiment in subatomic particles that gained notoriety as some began to fear its activity might lead to the end of the world — minimal techno maven Monolake (aka Robert Henke) has released a track for free download.
Monolake has taken his song “Cern” [...]
It’s rare for static buzzing to get as downright rollicking as “Adrenaline State,” a recent single by Hourglass Drops (aka N. Pavlov) on the tibprod.com netlabel. The track has all the hallmarks of white-noise music-making: the between-channels fuzziness, the hints of radio-interference chatter, and that crackling pre-digital warmth that practically smells of frayed wiring. But [...]
The British label Paradigm has re-released Machine, Trevor Wishart’s almost 40-year-old mix of automation and spoken texts. The label’s website, stalk.net/paradigm, has posted a three-minute excerpt of one of the album’s five pieces, in which the ratatatat of gears and the ringing of bells mix with vocals clips and a torrent of water. It’s a [...]
The Piop EP credited to Anton on the bumpfoot.net netlabel is comprised of the sort of nursery-rhyme electronic pop melodies that bring to mind the less aggressive work by Aphex Twin. Of the set’s seven tracks, especially promising are the second (”Sinetune I,” MP3), its lead tune plucked out as if on a cellphone keypad, [...]
As with No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers called upon Carter Burwell to score its quasi-thriller comedy, Burn After Reading. While the movie plays the genre for laughs, Burwell, their cinematic foil, plays it straight. He’s said he looked for inspiration in Jerry Goldsmith’s percussion-oriented score to the laugh-free zone that was Seven [...]
First a few seconds on electric guitar, which quickly fades. Later a deep hum surrounding a ringing piece of serrated metal. Then more guitar, tinged with feedback that comes close to matching the texture of the metal. Later on, single notes from what sounds like an acoustic guitar, plucked in the darkness, and then subsumed [...]
Released earlier this year on the Cut label (cut.fm), Christian Weber’s Walcheturm Solo displays the bassist’s skills at using the inherent sonic properties of a given room as a partner in his performance. Six minutes of excerpts from the album are available from the label’s website (MP3, MP3, MP3). In each, Weber mixes the textures [...]