Month: November 2003

Like clockwork, a new month brings a new archival treat from Keith Fullerton Whitman, aka Hrvatski. And speaking of clocks, this new MP3 is described by Whitman as “a field recording of the hourly bell procession in barcelona’s pla?a catalunya, later turned into a minor minimalist epic … via custom aleatoric attack-sensing band-pass filtering and special reverb algorithms. chilled.” It’s an expert application of digital processing to found sound (file here), the bells treated until they ring with a distinctly digital kind of mechanization, but also at times sounding as if in the distance. At seven and a half minutes, the track has more than enough time to develop. Check it out currently on his homepage, at reckankomplex.com. Oh, and as with his previous download (October 17 Downstream, here), this MP3 file’s genre tag in set to “Awesome.”

An act named Echtzeit had one of the standout tracks on a compilation titled Music to Listen to Music By, released a year and a half ago on Private Elektro Records, which is based in Leipzig, Germany (website here). Echtzeit has resurfaced with a new name, C:/, and two new tracks, both hosted for the past month by Private Elektro (here). The downloads couldn’t be more different from each another. One is close to eight minutes of overlapping sine waves and beats, all of whose internal clocks are slightly out of step, which leads to wonderful rhythmic surprises, the audio equivalent of optical illusions. At times a light keyboard melody, reminiscent of the 1980s synthesizer renaissance, arrives to lend a song-like coherence. The other track, a lengthy drone piece, dispenses with rhythm almost entirely, unless you count the waves of rumbling that constitute the work’s lower register and the occasional chimes that define its upper reaches.