Disquiet

If ever there were art music disguised as downtempo broken beats, it is Paul Crocker‘s Equilibria, recorded under his Dustmotes moniker and released for free download by the estimable dustedwax.org netlabel. On “Inner Tuning,” a mix of plaintive violin, post-rock exotica percussion, and a soundbite recording of a crime report all collide into a dramatization that’s less about narrative and more about frozen time (MP3). Early on, a slowed-down siren makes its way from one ear to another. At first, it’s just an effect rendered for its sonorous musicality, but then it reveals itself to have been a premonition of ill deeds. It’s the siren you hear as an everyday soundmark of urban life, only to be confronted later by the specific stark reality of that siren’s meaning — noise revealed as signal — when you flip on TV after dinner.

On “Sickle,” the individual parts of a fusion ensemble — trap drum, fuzzed-out guitar, gut-rumbling bass, light electric piano — flutter by like clips that are ever so slightly out of sync with each other (MP3). The effect is mesmerizing, and like one of Conlon Nancarrow’s famed player-piano works, challenges the primacy of human-performed music by presenting something whose very mechanical nature is an essential aspect of its rough beauty. If that is the goal of broken beat music, then “Sickle” reaches it.

And those aren’t even the finest tracks on Equilibria. That honor would arguably go to “Train” and “Oil Face,” both of which take brief snippets of existing recordings and transform them into the lead “voice” of fully considered compositions. In the case of “Train” it’s a snippet of a horn solo that appears on occasion above a bed of pizzicato plinking. It’s a dirge of a solo, each time around slowly pushing toward its conclusion. The repetition of the recorded — again: frozen — performance is in stark contrast with the emphasis in jazz on live playing, yet the affection inherent in the sampling — sampler as custodian — is undeniable (MP3).

On “Oil Face” it’s a tiny bit of a female folk vocal, heard as flittery wreckage, its verbal content unintelligible thanks to thick vinyl static and enough scratch-induced stuttering to suggest a turntable-induced stammer. When, about a minute and a quarter in, the track suddenly explodes with a pop exuberance, what’s heard is a song despite itself, a song that has managed to utterly dispense with the whole concept of lyric meaning, and still manages to combine voice and production into something elevating and intoxicating (MP3).

It’s only June as I type this, but if Equilibria isn’t on my best-of-2011 list it’s only because some seriously tremendous music arrives between now and the end of the year.

Get the full album, 11 tracks in all, for free download at dustedwax.org. More on Dustmotes/Crocker at dustmotes.net.

They are likely intended as interludes, even if they equal the number of vocal tracks. The album is The Travelers Ghost (no apostrophe), credited to Skipless. The tracks in question are all downtempo excursions into instrumental hip-hop, the beats wobbly and often pleasingly off-kilter, the mood smokey, The surface noise right in your ear if not your face. They’re also quite consistent. A lot of netlabel instrumental hip-hop albums feature one, maybe two, standout tracks, and a whole lot of material that either could have used more time in the sampler-cum-incubator. One of the tracks acknowledges its interlude status, including the word in its title, parenthetically — “Time (Interlude).” It’s all looped bass and drums, sodden vocal snippets, and dubby echo (MP3). “Vibe” trades the water-logged effect for something closer to heat-damaged, its samples slowing and speeding like a piece of warped vinyl, and making a smart contrast to the precise drum patterns (MP3). The other standout is the title track, which balances a piano that appears as little more than a trill and a shard of a split second, and a guitar that’s strung as loose as spaghetti — well, a spaghetti western (MP3).

Get the full release, for free, at dustedwax.org and at archive.org.

More on Skipless, who is from Ikaalinen, Finland, where he says he works solely from vinyl and an MPC, at skipless.com.

The percussion flanging left to right, splintering into feedback. The vocal snippets put through the glitch equivalent of autotune. The beats blank and broken. This is how Eufoteouria, on its self-titled album, makes instrumental hip-hop. The set’s 10 tracks, recently released on the dustedwax.org, are loping ventures into Poland’s after hours (there are two with guest vocalists rapping in Polish). Highlights include the muffled piano of “Spinal Cord” (MP3) and the robot torch song that is “7 am Blue pm” (MP3).

More on Eufoteoria, aka Poland-based Amadeusz Szczerbowski, at myspace.com/eufoteoria.