There must be a third round coming. These things come in threes, don’t they, like celebrity deaths and blockbuster movie franchises?

The “thing” in this case is the mass popularity of — the sudden mass consciousness of — what, generally speaking, is a matter of sonic composition relegated deep in left field, in the outer margins of music-posting hubs such as bandcamp.com, soundcloud.com, and archive.org, where avant-gardists are known to ply their trade in the after hours and share it with other out-sound listeners.

And so it’s especially appropriate that it was on soundcloud.com that Justin Bieber, the peculiarly youthful Canadian 16-year-old, was revealed to be utterly angelic … when one of his songs is slowed to the glacial pace of 800% its original length:

As of this writing, the Bieber art-prank has garnered over one and a quarter million plays, and almost 800 comments, the latter of which have turned the elegant Soundcloud waveform interface into block of harsh striations that look like what might happen if Paul Smith were given half an hour to art direct an issue of Benetton’s Colors magazine. Those comments tend toward the comparative: a user named Seefreund says “sigur ros on helium,” and adds a smiley face, while one named Precipidate noted: “Reminds me of John Tavener / Ben Frost.” Of course, it’s quite likely that all songs sound like a Sigur Ros sound check when slowed to eight times their intended pacing. What we do know is that when Sigur Ros is sped up by 800%, it resembles nothing remotely like Justin Bieber (for this we can, again, thank the struggling servers of soundcloud.com). What Predipidate is getting at is that ancient and contemporary music have, alike, strived for the angelic by using stasis as a compositional tool. We can expect more of these slow-mo mixes shortly — the question is whether early-polyphony experts like Anonymous 4 or Tallis Scholars will get in on the action. As a measure of the impact of the GBM (glacial Bieber moment), the usually practical-minded website lifehacker.com has run a how-to on what software can be employed to make one’s own “slowed-down ambient epic.”

And this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg, at the risk of extending the glacial metaphor. That honor would go to Inception, from director Christopher Nolan. Only a few weeks ago, it was discerned that the artfully attenuated main theme by composer Hans Zimmer for the brainteasing film is, in fact, an orchestration of a maudlin Édith Piaf pop song heard elsewhere in the film, slowed down almost beyond recognition, the key word being “almost”:

This Eames-ian matter of degrees fits tidily with Nolan’s narrative logic, which posits that dreams occur much more quickly than real life, so that hence a dream within a dream will happen all the more quickly — which is to say, will feel like it lasts all the longer. Nolan made his name with another kind of time-shifting, in the backwards-told tale Memento. (Summer 2010 was something of a bonanza for experimental orchestration. Shutter Island, the pulpy Martin Scorsese psychological-horror enterprise, featured slow-music masters like Ingram Marshall and up’n'comers like Max Richter. Both films star Leonardo DiCaprio.)

To think, a year and a half ago, I’d merely hoped that the latest Nintendo DS system — whose microphone allows for slowing and speeding of recorded audio — would spark sonic play among gamers. This current zeitgeist is deeper than mere concerns about sound for its own sake. Leif Inge’s “9 Beet Stretch” got a lot of attention six years ago (disquiet.com, villagevoice.com, nytimes.com) for its slowing down of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 to 24 hours, but it never seemed to tap into some broader cultural desire.

So, what’s the cause of popular attention to slow sound? What have Nolan and Bieber, the latter unwittingly, tapped into? Is it the drawn-out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the extended recession, the Kurzweil-ian hyperbole about incipient immortality, the way rapid changes in technology have us half-living in the future, or how concerns about global warming suggest that we may in our lifetimes witness the sort of change previously comprehendable solely by geologists?

Whatever is going on, time is most certainly on our minds.

Now, all this activity is unlikely to suddenly welcome the music of an Alan Morse Davies (check out numerous examples of his work: disquiet.com, at-sea.com) or a Thomas Köner (whose recently reissued 1993 album Permafrost — note the pertinent title — was the subject of debate earlier this month in the Disquiet.com “MP3 Discussion Group”) to the Billboard classical charts. But if the sonic properties of the Bieber opus are previously unfamiliar to you, and strike your fancy, please do track down what Davies has done with the sounds of pygmies and old jazz standards, among other source material, and what Köner can majestically summon from that most stasis-infused sound of all: static.

Get the full set, which includes a third track, and additional information, at darkwinter.com. More on Saiph, whose real name is Andre Faupel and who is based in Weimar, Germany, at saiphmusic.de.

More details at broque.de. More on Clapan/Korsunski at myspace.com/clapan and clapan.com.

Also, a little bit of additional terminology, including my advice on how to best experience a rave-like setting: “Massive party with multiple electronic acts, generally held in large warehouse or outdoor area. Unlike at any other such festival-style event, the best situation arguably isn’t watching an individual act, but standing at some blissful Venn Diagram spot where multiple simultaneous performances overlap in one singular, chest-shaking sonic experience.”

Full piece at csindy.com.

A car honks twice, and then what follows is an inundation of descriptions of a grisly automobile accident that has taken the life of a loved one, as well as of the detached bystanders who snap mobile-phone pictures of the splattered corpse.

A rector talks at length about the intense, the unknowably demanding, emotional requisites of his funeral work, and as his measured tones come to a halt, church bells seem to ring out in the distance, muffled by solemnity and space — and, no doubt, by some manner of digital processing.

The processing is courtesy of Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud), who produced the work, titled “Sighs, Wonders,” with writer Sukhdev Sandhu on a commission from the Spitalfields Festival London earlier this year. Two versions are available for free online. There’s a nearly 20-minute “instrumental” take (albeit with a few brief spoken passages) he posted yesterday:

And there’s a shorter excerpt (MP3), about half that length, at the website of the sponsoring festival:

Scanner and Sandhu previously collaborated on the hypertextual “nocturnal journal” nighthaunts.org.uk, with visuals by the digital studio Mind Unit. For “Sighs, Wonders” they again plumb matters of urbanism and mortality. As Scanner’s characteristic ambience unfolds, voices are heard intoning about the history of the land, matters of flesh and spirit, of “Roman bones” and “paupers’ bones” and everything in between.

Scanner’s early career involved using words he snatched from the ether (hence his name), the candid words of others unwittingly sewn into his sound art, but he also works with dramatic efforts, such as these texts. In one of the many “Sighs, Wonders” spoken bits, the following is uttered:

“For the upscale slummer, it’s a peepshow picturesque. For the missionary, it’s a chance to play imperial redeemer, tamer of beasts, a human chandelier radiating the darkness.”

Sandhu could be speaking of the unwashed masses of an urban setting. Or he could be speaking, more self-consciously, of the tension inherent in Scanner’s practice. The instrumental version of “Sighs, Wonders” is a lovely thing, a mix of moody synthesized noise and occasional field recordings, punctuated by brief utterances. The spoken version, naturally, brings the narrative concerns to the fore. The rector’s words are spoken not by Sandhu but by an actual local Shoreditch rector, whose presence blurs the space between documented and constructed reality. (Such a quintessentially British place name, Shoreditch, the sort of deeply mundane, semi-oxymoronic term that had it not existed, surely China Miéville would have created it for one of his novels.) We experience the piece (in either its instrumental or verbalized editions) simultaneously as a virtuous art, and as an archive of deterioration.

The instrumental track is at soundcloud.com/scanner (from which the above photo is taken). The track with extended vocals is at spitalfieldsfestival.org.uk. Scanner announced the instrumental’s availability at twitter.com/robinrimbaud and facebook.com/scannerdot. More on Scanner at scannerdot.com.

There is the opening vocal of children playing (sharing a theme from the album’s cover photograph), and the percolating guitar they’re set against; there is the mood-setting synthesizer. And then there is the synthesizer-like material that in time reveals itself as cleverly transformed vocals, vowels stretched until they bead, and that in turn provide a common ground between all the other components.

Vocals remain a conflicted subject and source in electronic music, and the way in which Luu treats them for “r735″ is exemplary — the field recording recognizes them as merely one part of the aural landscape, while the digitally manipulated ones are adopted as source material, useful for their texture and intrinsic sonic qualities.

Get the full set at archive.org. More on Luu (aka Rome-based Elisabetta Luciani) at myspace.com/elisaluu.

Interestingly, essentially all of the tracks appear to treat the sun as a source of warmth, life, light, and comfort — there is no intense noise, aside perhaps from the sizzle that appears in the opening cut, by Cubenx. Perhaps that leaves room for a sequel?

Get the full set at omfts.bandcamp.com.

Kannenberg can be heard providing brief introductions to all manner of related audio, from raw recordings to manipulated source material, and ranging from empty museums and industrial sites to public markets, tunnels, and other varied locations. Reactions on the listener’s part will alternate between binaural “you are there” wonder to the more challenging consideration of abstract sonic inventions, generally ones that combine the real-world sounds with synthesized ones.

A raw recording of a street market by Japanese artist Shinichiroa is particularly evocative, as voices move past in all directions and on all sides. On the other side of the equation, the Seattle-based duo of Steve Barsotti and Perri Lynch take sonic minutiae and construct from it a mysterious amalgamation; there’s an element of backward-masked treatments in there, which might be considered a self-conscious nod to the origins of the work.

Other participants in Kannenberg’s project include Kate Carr (second mention on disquiet.com this week), Roger Mills, Richard Lainhart, and others. More on the podcast at murmerings.com/radio. It is the second in a four-part series produced in conjunction with the World Listening Project (worldlisteningproject.org).

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/katecarr. More on Carr at myspace.com/k8carr. The track was released as part of the Things Are Bad in Haiti compilation at pertin-nce.com.

Original track at soundcloud.com/eiseikankei. More on Ichiro_, albeit mostly in Japanese, at myspace.com/icr0414 and twitter.com/ichiro_0414.