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 (MP3).
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Get the full set for free download at restingbell.net. The site provides these two links for reference to Nemoto: moufu-rokuon.net, magneticmnemonics.bandcamp.com
His music was covered here previously in 2011, 2010, and 2009.
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 (
In a clear case of more allowing for less to occur, the team-up of powerhouses Karlheinz Essl and Hans Tammen is a rich improvisation between the former’s laptop and the latter’s computer-processed guitar. To listen is often to hear neither, and to forget frequently that anyone, let alone two people, is playing. The opening track, “Brutz,” is often little more than flittering nuances. The guitar evaporates in the laptop’s processing, and the dual computers yield slivers of sound, drones that might just be the result of an ungrounded line, effects that could be artifacts in the sound recording. There’s a moment, for example, in a track titled “Prelock” when it sounds as if we’ve left the concert hall (the work was recorded live at Harvestworks in New York City back in May 2010) and wandered down to the subway. Elsewhere, there’s a point in “Nomisola” when piano chords are heard, but they drift away, subsumed in the nether-absence of obfuscating noises and general compositional entropy. Later, in the same track, what might be a guitar chord but resembles an archival orchestral recording gets tossed here and there like seaweed as it nears a shore, where it will soon dry and, soon enough, flutter away.
The Disquiet Junto is a group I founded on 
Much of the Mizati album ydna, released late last year, is a collection of slight elements aligned in unlikely combinations, among the most delectable of such combinations being those that mix emotionally remote piano lines with slender fragments of electronic percussion. There’s something special to how the piano here is almost inhuman in its simplicity, and how that spare quality allows for a camaraderie, a kind of cold simpatico, with the far more mechanized beat. The track titled, simply, “G” may be the highlight, its chords spaced apart to such an extent that they often decay fully before a new one enters in — an effect that is amplified, so to speak, as the close nears, when the decay fades into a drone that never quite seems to end (