The collection of “short” pieces on Adrian Kowalczewski’s seven-song EP Short Dance Songs aren’t all danceable — except in the “intelligent dance music” sense of the word: jittery, blurpy figments of digital pop that mess with beats as they go but have a syrupy, sweet, yet engaging sentimentality to them. They range through a series […]
There is continuing evidence that the netlabel may be, at its best, a singles medium. As the network of intentionally free music downloads has grown, the expanding listening options have inevitably complicated the selection process for consumers. (Yes, the material, usually available in MP3 form, is free, but why must the word “consumer” necessarily imply […]
The slowly circulating drones of “Gray Sky,” a free download by Ryonkt, supply 17 minutes of audio bliss. Layers of sound appear occasionally with some suddenness, only to be absorbed immediately into the cloud-like whole (MP3). Brief pulses surface above the bellows-like sine waves, but there’s never enough of a pattern to them to approximate […]
Contemporary r&b has given a bad name to melisma. Once upon a time, that mode of moving a single vowel around the octave and back was an emotive rhetorical tool in popular music. These days it’s just sung and otherwise employed by tools, showy vocalists and instrumentalists whose emphasis on their own virtuosic prowess has […]
There’s no didgeridoo on the five-track album Altered Signals by Mystified (aka Thomas Park), but there may as well be. Much of the music heard here has the slow, otherworldly onomatopoeia of that aboriginal device. The collection opens with the title cut: the crackle of data, the ping of noises echoing in a long, narrow […]
The strings are filtered through feedback loops, clipped and set on repeat like an album that’s reached the end of its groove. These strings — acoustic guitars in particular, and also what sounds like a banjo — are heard amid rastery, digitized sound elements. And those same strings are likely distorted until they become those […]
Sounds sourced from the real world and transformed into something either unreal or hyperreal serve as the foundation of a new compilation from the furthernoise.org netlabel. It is titled Explorations in Sound, Vol 3: Music of Sound and was curated by Roger Mills. Field recordings subjected here to digital modifications include rubber bands (yanked and […]
When downloading Joseba Irazoki’s new EP, Negurdin, from the con-v.org netlabel, if your time and bandwidth is limited, stick with the odd-numbered tracks. Irzaoki is one of the most interesting guitarists today working outside of traditional song form. The vocals on the album, to the extent there are any, appear on the even cuts as […]
There’s something about Eastern-bloc electronic music that often suggests a heavy influence of synth-rock, the soundtracks of Golem, the space explorations of Cluster, the melodic drones of Tangerine Dream. Veron, of Budapest, Hungary, fits that mold, judging by a recent four-track release on the Stasisfield netlabel (stasisfield.com). It’s most noticeable on “Early Morning” (MP3), a […]
A new collaboration by Adrián Juárez and Juan José Calarco provides one of those situations wherein the sum of the parts is considerably less than the constituent parts themselves. Except in this case, that statement is not just a compliment; it’s a formal measure of the duo’s accomplishment. The material that Juárez and Calarco plumbed […]