Mindshed by Mahoney & Peck on the Ethereal Live netlabel may be live but it is more than ethereal. There is blippy 8bit maneuvering (“The Divine Dark”) that yields broken beats, and Muslimgauze-style modal exploration (“Ghost Transmission”), as well as gaseous meandering (“Interstellar Murmur”). One highlight is a track, “The Pale Blue Dot” (MP3), with pixel percussion, these fissures that seem more like absences, sudden rhythmic moments of digital clarity that lend momentum to a cloud of synthesized dust. The collection comes from three different live performances: from broadcasts on the websites stillstream.com and electo-music.com, and from “City Skies 2011 sets in Atlanta, Georgia.”
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Get the full set at archive.org and at ethereallive.wordpress.com. Mahoney & Peck are Mark Mahoney and Michael Peck.
More than anything, some of the stronger tracks on Enko‘s Woods Moons, those earlier in the 14-track set, bring to mind the off-kilter rhythms of the band Battles at its most approachable, situations in which rock’n'roll is reduced to a shuddering husk, less feral than high-strung, less angry than anxious — and also situations that are enduringly electronic, whether inherently or associatively, with a rich dependence on automation’s rigorous verve and industrial’s manic momentum. The parallel is somewhat confusing, since Woods Moons appears to be the work of an individual, not a band — which is to say, if Battles was a band imitating broken machines, then Enko appears to be an individual using a machine to resemble such a band. Nonetheless, however it was recorded, the mix of jerky percussion and striated guitar on “Stouk” (
The wind chime is not the most likely percussive instrument in a hip-hop track — nor a likely melodic component, for that matter. It is slight, and prone to inaccuracy, and has all the swagger of a mid-nap pixie-dust sprite. But in the hands of Third Person Lurkin, a characteristically old-school member of the roster at the Bulgarian netlabel Dusted Wax, the chime serves multiple purposes. (It also, truth be told, may be a tiny bell and not a chime, but the effect is the same.) It initially appears in the track “Over Forgotten Places,” off the Cloud Mirror album, as an accent, one sound among many. Even when it initially repeats, it seems more like a flourish than a building block. But as the track proceeds, that’s exactly what it is: the key enabler of swing in the track, a swing that’s as fragile as a dust-laden cobweb in an afternoon breeze, but a swing nonetheless (
The beach is a useful metaphor for a drone album. It offers images and associations including stasis, a blank horizon, an abyss-like edge, the threat of undertow, the white noise of natural occurrences. The metaphor provides the title for the latest from Summons of Shining Ruins, aka Shinobu Nemoto. Titled On the Beach, it is five tracks of lightly layered drones. The hiss on “It Was a Tragedy of Microscopic Proportions” in particular sounds like distant surf, a persistent low-level whir that suggests some massive outbreak of tinnitus. Beneath and above it all is a cantilevered melodic pulse, an ebb and flow of church-organ gravitas that has the feel, again, of a wave coming and going. The deep horn-like sound in turn comes to figure that of a warning to ships in a deep, unforgiving fog (
You can, indeed, have your UI cake, or at least your UI eye candy, and eat it, too. And sometimes the easiest way to accomplish this goal is to relegate the two different tasks to two different online locales. The netlabel Pocket Fields, for example, is lovely, as is often the music that it releases. Each page on its Tumblr-powered site (