And then a bell rings. And we’ve started anew. The remainder of the album’s four tracks are really what Hart’s up to. That opening bit wakes you up, so he can settle you back down. That bell is the start of “Emporia,” which employs a small amount of feedback amid layers of vocals, twisted like a modern take on an old Beatles ploy, in which syllables are tweaked just beyond the possibility of comprehension. The difference here is, the actual vocal is never heard, just the ghost sound of vowels turned this way and that, like a half-remembered song (MP3).

“Colors That Surround You” confirms the somewhat retro mode with a keyboard that’s reminiscent of a Rhodes piano, though it’s filtered through just enough glitchy effects to keep it modern (MP3). “Kontakt” again uses as its main sonic material small pieces of warped vocals, but they’re slightly less mellifluous, and more block-like, than in “Emporia”; the seams between these snippets provide a kind of quietly chaotic rhythm (MP3).

And for an album this compositionally circumspect and self-knowledgeable, it’s no surprise that the closing track would provide a coda. That track is “Wilderness of the City,” in which a slow industrial rhythm, less a beat than a groove of contorted metal, brings to mind the opening noise-making of “When Someone Loves You No More.” And perhaps to make a point about the relative properties of discomfort, far more unsettling is the way a cello slips out of tune, and the way a guitar scrapes like a butcher sharpening his tools, and the way those little vocal snippets continue, claustrophobically, to fail to get out much more than a breath (MP3).

In the end, the album’s title may be less a recommendation than a challenge.

Full release at the netlabel restingbell.net. More on Hart, who’s based in Washington, Illinois, at myspace.com/derrickhartmusic.

Those are just two of the album’s seven tracks. Full release at darkwinter.com. More on oVdk at usyugana.hp.infoseek.co.jp, and on Bunk Data at bunkdata.com.

Also making the top 10: (8) a news report that included information on why Brian Eno likely won’t be nominated for an Oscar this year (for his work on director Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones), the forthcoming new Autechre album, and Nortec Collective’s symphonic aspirations; (9) a “Quote of the Week” by sound artist Andrea Polli describing where art and science do not overlap; and (10) thoughts on issues in “interface lag” (or iteration lag) in the ongoing development of casual music-making apps.

The most popular post of the last 60 days was an overview of the, in my opinion, 10 best iPhone/iPod Touch Music/Sound Apps of 2009.

The most popular post of the last 90 days was of field recordings made at a church in Rye, England.

The most popular post of the last year is a streaming playlist of guitar-based electronica.

The 10 most searched-for terms during the month of January were, in declining order of popularity, with some ties in there, “brian” (as in Brian Eno), “commercial,” “performances,” “eno” (yeah, the other half), “mention” (I have no idea what that’s about), “autechre” (whose new record, titled Oversteps, is pictured at left), “banks violette,” “broad,” “drone,” and the especially peculiar “info wedding.” (Right after those 10 came “basinksi,” as in William Basinski, “bush of ghosts,” as in the compilation Our Lives in the Bush of Ghosts and the Brian Eno / David Byrne album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and “cicada,” as in the insect that is often used as a point of comparison for electronic background noise.)

On the postcard for the concert held last Wednesday, January 13, at Cafe du Nord in San Francisco, “Kill Prog” was in large letters in the center, set in blood red against a darker background image that seemed to show the ceiling of a tunnel.

The image was appropriate, even if the musicians assembled at the basement-level speakeasy had come not to kill prog but to unearth it. They were tunneling back in time, to an era of jazz and rock fusion, and approaching it with a mix of rigor and affection.

If they were killing prog, they killed it they way one kills one’s heroes — to whittle away the lesser aspects, until what’s left is admirable enough to hold up to one’s standards.

The headlining quartet (shown below) featured Scott Amendola (Nels Cline, Charlie Hunter) on drums, Thomas Dimuzio (more adventurous, noise-minded projects than even could be hinted at here) on keyboards, Jon Evans (Tori Amos) on bass, and Ava Mendoza (Mute Socialite) on guitar. Together they summoned up a mix of Discipline-era King Crimson, and more broadly the fusion bands that flourished as various individuals left various “electric-era” bands of the late trumpeter Miles Davis and ventured down various different paths. Mendoza in particular mixed Crimson leader Robert Fripp’s looping and arcane scales with Adrian Belew’s penchants for backward effects and squawking seagull sounds.

At times I found myself thinking of MVVP, the New Orleans supergroup consisting of Stanton Moore, Johnny Vidacovich, Rich Vogel, and George Porter, though Amendola and company were less interested in trance-like communal music-making, and more in simultaneous individual soloing that allowed for stark, illuminating contrasts.

The opening act, the Dominique Leone Band, was a modular ensemble led by Leone on keyboards and vocals (the latter as nakedly impassioned as they are self-effacingly thin) — “modular” because a trumpeter and saxophonist occasionally joined the core of Leone, Matt Ingalls (clarinet), Shayna Dunkelman on Xylosynth (the sonic palette of which shifted with each song), and a guitarist whose name I didn’t catch, and who moved between electric and acoustic. Leone’s original songs channel pure-pop melodies and emotions through a performance style that is deeply informed by minimalist composition, by intricate melodic patterning and extended, dreamy repetition — the result suggested Animal Collective covering the works of Steely Dan, or of Steely Dan covering the songs of Philip Glass.

More on the musicians at scottamendola.com, thomasdimuzio.com, avamendozamusic.com, and dominiqueleone.com. Above image of Amendola and company from a set at flickr.com/photos/michaelz1.

In the past, this has involved everything from children’s records to the landing of man on the moon to early modern poets. The November 17, 2009, episode of Voice on Record, just posted online earlier this week, focuses on the sound of the voice in experimental music and sound art (MP3). Among the pieces heard is work by Luciano Berio. In between examples, Williams discusses the origins of this sort of music in not only technological advances, but in the culture of experimental radio. The segment, the 12th in the Voice on Record series, is titled “The Voice in Musique Concrète and Electronic Music.”

Full details at resonancefm.com. More on Voice on Record’s Williams and this specific segment of the series at sbkw.net.

Not a whole lot of vocal music gets covered on Disquiet.com, for reasons that have somewhat eluded me, though came into mental focus when I read the following recently in Martha Mockus’s book Sounding Out (Routledge, 2008), a critical overview of the work of Pauline Oliveros, the avant-accordionist and deep thinker about improvisation and listening. This is Oliveros speaking, as quoted in Sounding Out:

“I figured out a practical use for the overtone series. As you know tones consist of not one but many overtones. If you listen carefully you can hear them. The tone quality of any instrument depends on the prominence of these overtones. For example, the sound of the flute, the octave overtone is most prominent but not the higher overtones. On the clarinet the octave but mainly the 12th is prominent and etc. The human voice though has the most complex overtone series.”

Much of contemporary experimental music, especially experimental electronic music, is focused on the transformation of individual sonic elements. There’s something about the human voice that is so dense with tone, so complex, that it can overshadow everything around it. When the human voice is one of those elements subject to transformation, often the composition, the instrumental composition, becomes a background — becomes secondary — to the vocal. The exception, of course, is when the meaning of what is sung or spoken is itself ignored — or, more to the point, rendered secondary — in favor of tone and texture. And that is the sort of vocal music that ends up getting covered here.

In any case, this Voice on Record segment is a good introduction to early experiments in using tape delay and extended vocal techniques to transform the human voice.

The piece is by Mathias Delplanque. Titled “Call Center,” it’s recent a stereo reduction of a sound installation of his from several years back. It was part of an exhibition titled “Bombay Maximum City.” The sounds, he reports, were “recorded during the summer of 2006 in a call center in Gurgaon (suburbs of New Delhi).” The result is a half hour of sound that flirts with narrative, but also manages to transform the everyday into something sonically complex. That the source of the audio is itself such a quintessential emblem of technology, of globalism, of communication services, and of interpersonal mis-communication only adds to its impact.

More at the releasing netlabel, cronicaelectronica.org.

Chances are this is not what M.I.A.’s forthcoming “I’m Down Like Your Internet Connection” (reportedly based on her three-hour tech-support phone call, according to Rolling Stone) is going to sound like.

More on the release at ambientblog.podbean.com.

There’s a stark, brash, nerve-shattering interruption shortly into the otherwise lightly metronomic “3 PM,” track two of the EP’s three — after that kicked bucket, sure to spike your volume meter and your arm hair, comes a beeping, churning, rattling roil. It’s a repetition free of the stasis inherent in true repetition — it’s the fractured repeat of a defeated machine, maybe a laser printer on the fritz (MP3).

And then comes the perhaps inevitable combination: the closing track, “Early.” It has no formal repetition, but instead the broken beat of something that has the nuance of the repeated (a voice like a sample; drum pads that fail to kick in, until they do, at which point they spasm), but that declines to do the expected. The “New York City” tape reappears, buried in and eventually piercing the mix (MP3). Amid the chaos, the voice may even be welcome.

Get the release at adozen.org. More on Hopen (aka Childe Grangier) at irrigationworks.net and myspace.com/hopenchilde.

This music, the rich and complex tone that generally goes by the name “drone,” moves from near-silence to an immersive breadth and back again, over and over, like clockwork, yes, but like a clock wrapped in something gauze-soft. Take “Before I Let the Sunshine Rot,” the opening, and arguably the best, track off Ian Hawgood’s recent Phantom Channel album, with which it shares its title (MP3). While not all the music on the record adheres to this pattern as concertedly as does its title cut, the lilt does make itself felt throughout — in “The Latin Quarter,” there’s a tremulous reverberation (MP3) that’s far more aggressive than anything in “Before I Let the Sunshine Rot,” and crowd voices are mixed in, but the overall effect is the same. One other favorite, among the album’s eight tracks, is “Pirouette of Cotton 1,” which adds a thin female vocal, a light harmonic contribution, less a lead vocal than another ingredient in the drone recipe (MP3).

Get the full release at either phantomchannel.co.uk or archive.org. More on Hawgood at his website, koenmusic.com.

As is WHY?Arcka’s mode, he takes a small slice of a pre-existing song — nowhere near as nanoscopic as would be an experiment in granular synthesis, but neither is it as reductive as a P. Diddy pop production — and inspects the fragment until it yields something akin to a funky piece of conceptual art.

The track opens with a quick loop, all rhythm and moan, a moan so sublimated it might be mistaken for a nuance to the bass line, which is exactly what it becomes as “Street Walkin’ (Gone)” takes shape. Then comes a smattering of guitar, hinted at before it’s allowed to be heard fully. And then the vocal, a tantalizing snippet of the song’s title. And then the whole thing goes into breakdown mode, even more spare than at the opening, a slim mash of beat and vocal, allowed to go about its own staunch business.

Forgive the play-by-play appreciation, but this review is really just mimicking exactly what WHY?Arcka himself enacts upon the sample at hand: teasing out the encoded beauty.

The excellent bandcamp.com interface provides its own proprietary mode of sharing and providing free download, encapsulated in this tidy widget: